It creeps in. The subtle grief behind my eyes. I’m not trying to shut it out, but the nature of my busy day-to-day often pushes it off to a different place. It has been living somewhere not quite far away but not quite nearby. There are also blessed moments when I almost forget it, or maybe just accept it, when consciousness awakens to itself and I’m just here, now.
But many times daily, the mind and the memory the body holds get going and it creeps in. Words I can’t forget, eyes full of seeing and love, touches that made me come alive, the way I felt so accepted and celebrated. Sometime warm, then electric, then sweetly comfortable, the imaginings into the life we hoped to build, wrapped around us with hope and security. Dreams we both never dared to dream of before.
Mixed in with all that light, somehow, impossibly, coexists the blame, the hurt, the slow, subtle suffocation that I didn’t see coming. The pain that led me to forget myself and desperately grasp for something, instead of being with what was. A pain so deep and old, consuming the one I loved so that all he could do was try to survive.
Oh sweet, broken humans. We have so much hurt. We have so much loss. It is so universal, and yet, so invisible. We forget what we each are walking around with, all of the wounds we are each carrying inside these fragile hearts. It is so hard to accept it sometimes. To send it love. To let it be there, but not consume us, not allow it to make us forget who we really are, nor to forget that each of our brothers and sisters are those same beings of light. Even those who have hurt us.
How would it be if we could approach these broken hearts with deep seeing, forgiveness, and acceptance? How would it be if each of us could greet each person in our human family by placing a hand over their tender heart, nodding to that pain in them and seeing ourselves in that universal hurt.
“I am headless.” You and I are not separate.
If we could remember, would it still be possible to make one another into “unreal others?” Would it still be possible to blame one another for our flat spots and broken edges that lead us all to act unskillfully from time to time?
The joy lives inside these tender hearts, too. But with these breaking-openeds, it can take such time to return.
The gift of mindful presence makes is possible for us to survive these almost invisible hurts. It certainly isn’t easy. But moments of hopeful presence do spring up like crocuses in the early moments of spring, when the ground is still so cold and hard from winter. Before the body of mother earth is tenable for anything else.
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