Coagulatio III
Exuberant is existence, time a husk.
When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out
and devours space;
love goes mad with the blessings, like my words give.
Why lay yourself on the torturer’s rack
of the past and future?
The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacities
will find no rest.
Be kind to yourself dear—to our innocent follies.
Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not
help you dance.
You will come to see that all evolves us.
If you put your heart against the earth with me,
in serving every creature,
our Beloved will enter you from our sacred realm
and we will be, we will be
so happy.
-RUMI
-translated by Daniel Ladinsky
Monday, April 11, 2011
Day 6 of Hyperbaric Dive
A failure to believe in myself is a failure of responsibility. That message came through loud and clear at the end of my meditation this morning. Now, I have to say that I’m hard-wired for responsibility, growing up too soon as the eldest child (and often surrogate parent) in a wounded, unstable family. But how often have I left myself out of the equation in an attempt to be “responsible?” Am I believing in myself if I neglect to stretch my body in the morning, and instead use my precious energy washing a sink full of dishes? Or when I do a hundred household tasks, but fail to rest as much as my body needs, or take the time for writing, for creating, for listening. As my friend Devaa Haley Mitchell advises in her work as a teacher of the Divine Feminine, “Feed the Feminine First” --tend to what nourishes one’s own body, spirit and soul, before focusing on the needs of others. How many of us women need to have that posted on our fridges and plastered across our foreheads?
There are other ways I have not believed in myself, and thus have not been responsible. During the darkest days of my illness, I’ve often failed to see any value in my life at all, especially when I’ve been unable to work, or to contribute to life in the ways I would like. There are times I’ve been merciless with myself, secretly thinking that perhaps my life isn’t worth what it takes to keep me alive and trying to get well. I feel as sadness well up, realizing how hard I have been on myself at times, a failure to respond to myself with compassion.
It’s not easy in our extraverted, sensate society, one that values the external, the flashy, the ephemeral. Facing the inevitable Shadowlands of sickness and death and decay is hardly a comfort zone our culture. As Kat Duff writes in The Alchemy of Illness,
Illness is the shadow of Western civilization, the antithesis of the rampant extraversion and productivity is so values. As we attempt to exile disease from our world, it persists to haunt us with an ever-menacing guise, and we need it all the more to be whole, to save us from the curse of perfectionism…I have heard it said that illness is an attempt to escape the truth. I suspect it is actually an attempt to embody the whole truth, to remember all of ourselves.”
On a deeper level I know that my journey has purpose and meaning. I’ve done my best to surrender to the Life I have been given and to allow its unraveling alchemy. Today I was listening to a talk by my teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee on the nature of service. We usually think of it as something we do, he said, but that’s just one part of service. The most important part of service is to witness, to be in remembrance of the Beloved. In the silent, endless hours of exhaustion I’ve experienced over the years, it seems that just being present to it, and remembering that it, too, is part of the One, is an enormous service to a culture that ignores the initiatory qualities of illness and suffering.
“Coagulatio III,” 4x6” collage on paper from
The Oracle of Alchemy, ©2006-2011 by Colette de Gagnier. To order prints from this series, please visit Alchemy of the Divine and Colette's Visionary ArtGallery.
Rumi poem from Love Poems from God, translated by Daniel Ladinsky. To order:
To learn more about the inspired work of Devaa Haley Mitchel and her teachings on the Divine Feminine, please visit Radiant Essence
To order Kat Duff’s brilliant book, The Alchemy of Illness, go to http://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Illness-Kat-Duff/dp/0609899430
For more information on the work of Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, please visit GoldenSufi.org and WorkingwithOneness.org
