This photo is of where,
three years ago today, Dear, my beloved,
ended her physical presence in the incarnation we shared for 45 years. Â
A fuller story, should you wish one, can be revealed through a few of my essays from that time. This one is solely about my sense of things today, what I wrote in my journal this morning.
Each of us, Dear and I, had deep experiences to embrace and attend to wherever they would lead us, experiences that required we could no longer enjoy the fruits of one another’s physical presence.Â
Since everyone’s soul and its passion for Oneness needs no body to keep moving toward the light, I’m confident that Dear’s journey of the past three years has been just as wild as mine in its loving demand for surrender and expansion. Profoundly transformative is the polite term that pops to mind. Â
For me, this includes both the ever-increasing pain of any separation from God, and the equally increasing joy of feeling God’s presence in all manifestations of existence. Â
In the anguish of separation I sense some meaningful connection to the emptiness Dear felt that led her to surrender to God her physical shell, as the only form of devotion remaining to her. In every other way she felt completely empty––dead, in other words. For her that meant she did not feel God’s presence, the presence that had been the animating force of her life since birth. And that absence made irrelevant any other reason to live on this earthly plane.
I don’t feel anything close to that absolute emptiness, but I get sobering whiffs of it as I feel the terror of my ego’s death when I am anything less than ferociously committed to living in the reality of God Alone.
And this, I feel, is part of the great gift of this incarnation for me––of which the suicide of my beloved is a sacred part.
A drawing on the eve of today’s commemoration:
Lovely, beautiful, and wise
Towards the end of my mother’s life, she used to talk about a sense of dread when she woke up in the morning, that made her not want to get up. What for? I have had sobering whiffs, too, that you are giving source to, Steve. It truly is terror. The experience of ego is so strong. And living in the reality of God, you speak of, annihilates it. It’s so amazing how we can have both those experiences. And that even a ferocious commitment can’t always keep us from that terror……….until it does. This is the real work, isn’t it? Strengthening and strengthening our ability to choose, until there is only one choice. I don’t want to die afraid. I want shining eyes and spirit.
Love
Love You Steve