Picture above is of the total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017 on Kiawah island, SC
The reason I have a spiritual practice, why I immerse myself in it, is because I have been trying to figure out how to allow my inner guidance/the voice of my soul to help me navigate the hard life realities, from the mundane, to big overwhelming emotions, to loss. Trying to be kind to myself and others, to not let fear constrict and contract how I express myself, trying not to rigidly control myself or others in a attempt to be safe, emotionally, physically.
I am thinking about this a lot right now as I approach my 12th wedding anniversary on May 5th. What do I know to be irrefutably true? There is a tight constricted spot right over my heart, my breathing feels constricted, and it hurts as I think about this marker and what will never be both for this May 5th and all the May 5ths that will come after this one. I can’t argue with this or change it.
In the first months after Andres died, I would meet other families at the park when my son was playing, engaging in conversations with the mom or dad who was there with their child. I would talk to them about Gabriel’s Dad as if he were home or at work in that moment, waiting for us to all come back together again and live our life. I knew I would most likely never see either those parents or that child ever again. All the while I was believing and bending reality, immersed in this moment of reprieve, as I shared small snippets about Andres and our life as a family. I can’t say it was pretending because it felt innocently real, and yet there was still a clear part of me that understood Andres was dead and was never coming back. Both of them were true.
I am not trying to make the best out of this place where I find myself - a widow, a single mom, a heartbroken human. And yet I am discovering peace, moments of joy, spaciousness, and a satisfying rhythm in my life that are here alongside my grief, and also eclipsing my grief. There are those things that I would not have experienced if Andres were still alive, like the perceptible, irrevocable ways my heart has opened and I experience moments of joy and appreciation, only possible because of this loss that makes those moments so poignant and tangibly real.
The picture above is of the total Solar Eclipse on April 8th, 2024 taken in Winston Salem, NC.
What drew me to the Daoism were the inner alchemy practices. Inner alchemy as a defined and intentional spiritual practice with rich depth and consciousness about how to work with internal polarity and consciously transform myself. A spiritual practice that sees polarity, not as a burden or something to be overcome, but as an essential element for accessing something beyond our mind and linear thinking. What some call the quantum field, God, or love, or the Wuji, or the neutral space, or the third way.
Rumi refers to this as Zero circle and describes it like this:
Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
To gather us up.
We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.
So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Besides ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness
Our minds can not make sense of it, can only seem to process either or, hot and cold, judgement. My answer is and will always be all of the above. Making the best of things seems like saying the life I have is a consolation prize for what might have been. The paradox is that one of the things that has most helped me sink into the zero circle is the death of the person who was my real partner in exploring this very same Daoist path. But actually not so paraodoxical, because the heart is the ultimate alchemist.
Thanks for taking time to join me here. I look forward to the next time.