“Not so much, but it’s really something I should not discuss because it should never have been in the first place. I’m sure karma and her friends are raining down upon my head. I deserve to battle alone…”

No.

That is a lie. A lie that your heart tells you because you are punishing yourself for the crime of being human.

You and me? We are so very human.

I don’t know the specifics of your story. I don’t know the exact reason you feel that karma has decreed that you suffer in solitude. But since I am human, just like you, I can fill in the blanks, and I can imagine.

So from that space, I will tell you now. It is not true. You don’t ever deserve to battle alone. None of us do.  So, do me a favor, dearest, and shut that down right now. Even just for the time you read this letter.

Now, it’s true that I don’t know a damn thing for sure about your story. But shared experience holds a pretty clear mirror, and I see beyond your words. I feel your heart, and I know.

I know, love. I know.

You have loved, haven’t you?  You have loved someone you believe you shouldn’t, and it is over, and you hurt, and maybe someone else has gotten hurt as well, someone you never wanted to hurt along the way.

You are punishing yourself for that. Holding yourself responsible, neon-lit scarlet letter upon your chest. Your heart is broken, but you don’t think you have the right to feel that grief, so even the sadness becomes another marker of all the ways you have done wrong.

But here’s the thing, I don’t know too many people who have gotten through very much life without at some point and in some way, loving someone we’re told we shouldn’t. If karma decreed that we be alone for the human act of loving when the world says we should not, then most of us would be destined to exist in perpetual solitary confinement. Some sort of horrible self-constructed purgatory, forever and ever.

Our hearts are beautiful and mysterious and sometimes selfish and not often very forward thinking.

And they do what they are here to do.

Love.

To seek love and find love and open to love, again and again, and again.

To fill in what is empty in us.

To allow ourselves even momentary kindness, or touch or desire.

To be seen and known, even for a brief time or a time outside of time, no matter what lies on the other side.

Bravely and recklessly. In kindness and fullness and in greed and desperation.

So, without knowing anything about what is happening for you right now, know this:

If the act of loving, even outside of contract or social acceptance or what the world decrees is ‘right’ makes you deserving of anything, it is entering the room with all of us who have stood where you are now standing.

All of who have loved and lost and broken, who have brought hurt to others. All of us who have confused and tangled our own hearts, or made questionable choices to quench our own desires, or stepped outside of our own integrity to taste what called to our souls or our bodies or our longings for things we cannot even name.

This is a part the humanness that connects us.

Threads woven between broken and stumbling souls.

Fumbling and scared.

Wanting and open.

Holy and whole.

We don’t get here clean. We can’t. It’s not how we were made, us miraculous, stumbling, terribly messy, deeply wanting humans.

And my god, if I don’t believe we all deserve infinite tenderness inside of this truth.

I didn’t always know this. I didn’t know it when I made the choices that cost me my own grasp on integrity and all the stories I had told myself about who I was and the things I would and would not do.

Not when my choices left me dazed, months later, when it felt as if the entirety of the life I had known had burned down in the wake of my own decisions, collateral damage beyond my comprehension.

I didn’t know it when a few short years after that someone dear to me broke my trust to have a hidden relationship with someone I will love until the day that I die. I didn’t know it when I yelled and wailed and walked through the night with tears streaming down my face, sowing the seeds of anger and resentment and letting them take hold and root down deep.

I didn’t learn this lesson until I fell into a love that was a remembering.

A love where past and present and future and countless parallel lives tangled and exploded into life, as real and anything I could touch or taste in front of me. A love that was my first experience of what it was to be seen and loved for who and what I am, never once asked to be anything or anyone else. A love so holy it could never have felt wrong. This love, the groundwater and memory and inevitability of it, it pulled me forward in spite of everything I thought I knew about what was good or right.

In the process of this loving, I chose a path that was not the one the world would have had me make. One that brought great hurt to another and once again risked the foundation of the life I had rebuilt from the ashes. And in the process of this loving, I made a choice not between goodness and wholeness, as I first thought, but instead a choice that was an integration, finally, of the two.

In the aftermath of this love, there was a difference inside of me. A self that refused apology, that recognized that a such a love, it demands that we listen. It asks if we are willing to taste, to allow, to open. In the aftermath of this love, I found redemption and forgiveness was finally made possible.

When there is a chance for a love like that, I learned. We take it. And we don’t always take it the way we believe we should. And we don’t always take it without betraying others, or ourselves. Sometimes, integrity, the real and rooted kind, is something we only find through the path of that betrayal.

And if that was true for me, then it was also true for the others who had broken my trust and brought hurt to my doorstep. There was no forgiveness of self without the forgiveness of others.

It is true, when we stumble off the path that marks our relationship with our own integrity, that profoundly personal and incomparable relationship, there is work to be done. Hard, painful, deeply humbling work.  None of my words are here are to offer excuse or absolution. That is between you and whatever and whoever you answer to in the deepest part of your soul. It may require penance or the hard work of rebuilding or the letting go of what refuses to repair.

And every last one of those will hurt and come with costs I cannot know or name.

So no, I’m not handing out free passes or making light of what has been done. God knows I am still carrying the marks of my own choices. And god knows, it may be something you live with now and forever, as it has been for me. This knowing of what it is for your actions to impact another, maybe even someone you dearly and deeply love, is not a thing that can be undone. I’m not going to sugar coat or gloss over that reality. But I’m not going to let you sink into the pit of self-loathing either.

And I am going to tell you that there is redemption, even now, right there waiting for you.

It’s true, redemption and forgiveness are sticky things, almost always. But never more so than when we are asked to shine that light on our own hopelessly human hearts.

And maybe its presumptuous of me to type this, when I don’t really know a damn thing of what your heart is living right now, and there are days when I know my own work of self-forgiveness is a patched up, beaten around work in perpetual progress.

And possibly this is simply my own attempt to remind or even convince myself that I am worthy, in spite of the times in my life when I’ve left the path of my own integrity, and brought havoc by the act of my own loving.

Or maybe it is only this, that we need to meet each other here. That we must.

We must remind one another of the fact that we are here, and alive and human, so terribly and beautifully and sometimes painfully alive. And that very thing is what makes it so blindly brilliant, so achingly true.

We are not defined only by our actions in the moments we step off the path. I cannot believe that because that would damn me and you and all of us. I believe that ultimately, what defines us is the way we keep stepping back on. The way we trip and struggle through the wilderness of our selves, the way we wander through the dark desert night believing ourselves worthy of being cast out. And still, somehow, when the light rises in the sky, our path appears again, and we step back on, put one foot in front of the other, and onward we go.

And you, my dear friend, are finding your way back to the path. Even if you can’t feel it or see it right now, you are.

And you deserve to be there. And so do I. And so do all the rest of us.

We are here, you and I and everyone we loved in the light and all of those we have loved in the shadowy spaces.

Our hearts doing the thing they are made to do, pulsing and yearning and casting aside all doubt in the hope that we will be met and seen and known in holiness and in wholeness, with our guilt and our scars and every last ounce of hope remaining in our bones.

Here we are, you and I. Hearts beating. Still loving. No matter what.

______

Photo from header image by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

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“When my heart feels so much, I need you to help it. You are the one who knows hearts. “

“I don’t know that I know hearts. I just believe in them. “

We are on the freeway, spinning toward home under a wide-open moon.   A plane is coming in, fast and low. This night the strain between us takes more room in the cab of the truck than our bodies do. The plane passes over; so close I swear that if I reached up in just the right way the frame of the truck would dissolve into nothing and it would be just my hands, holding up the plane under that wide-open moon.

Who on that plane is waiting for magic, I wonder? Who on that plane left magic behind? Is it to home and sanctuary and rest they are heading, or to the pounding and hopeful heart of possibility? Who will be met and encircled and who will walk out alone and make their own peace with the guardian moon? And who among those nameless strangers has given up ever being met, and just holds on to the moment, devoid of hope.

The plane is out of sight, and still we roll down the freeway. The tension of unwanted silence stretches and expands the space between us. It amazing how impossibly large a small space can feel when we have closed something of ourselves to the one we are with.

We are all, I think in that moment, somewhere between leaving and arriving. Arriving and leaving. Often we don’t know which till long after it’s done.

We all slip-slide through the liminal spaces. The suspended animation between here and there.  That’s all there is really. I sometimes wonder if grace is just a word for the times that we manage to live in full trust of the graceless in-between.

“How do you know the difference between valid doubts and a damaged heart putting up walls where they don’t belong?”

“You don’t know. You can’t. You can grasp tight a deep-rooted knowing with all the certainty of the world, and have it be just the optimistic projection of a hopeful heart.   Or you may have all the doubts and uncertainties and wake up years later to find you’ve grown into your own happiness without even knowing that you did. And that same person you once doubted will still be there by your side, loving you well.“

“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.”
Anais Nin

Exactly as we are. Scared and hopeful. Damaged and whole. Searching for love and terrified it will find us. Because if it finds us – and we answer it’s call – we will have to lay it all on the line. Again.

“Take a deep breath love. We weren’t made to be abandoned. It just feels that way sometimes.”

It feels that way sometimes. It feels that way enough that we’re quick to run at the slightest possibility. We read the present with the wounds of the past rising right to the surface. Casting a murky doubt in spaces that beg for trust. Better to push, to predict the inevitable end and escape before you become casualty of another goodbye.

So we stay up all night, turning our back to potential and curling into a hard ball on the sofa. Letting tears fall to the whirring of the ceiling fan and the quiet noises a home only really makes when it believes its occupants given over to dreams.   We fight the hardest battle not with another, but with ourselves. With the parts that want to run far and fast and hard, and every pulse of heart and spirit and soul that begs to stay and trust and believe.

But all planes land eventually. And some on those planes will be met, and some will not.   And for all of those people, there are beginnings and endings and middles and sunsets and wide open moons that fill the cabs of red pickup trucks with a light that just happens to be the color of hope. Light that drowns out the silence and replaces it with the sound of the clumsiest and most beautiful sort of grace.

Because I do believe in hearts. Even the ones who will live always, tucked away at the root of my pain. I believe that those hearts knew – just like mine has always known – what it was that they needed.   Without understanding or knowing. Leaving room for mistakes and regrets. I still believe in hearts.

Because all we can ever do is invite someone into our experience. We cannot control whether they enter, or if and when they choose to leave. Or even if or when we will.

You can invite them in, and you can walk through the open doors. One step at a time. Clumsy and uncertain and still full of the brilliant grace of the in between. Believing, in spite of all the odds.

Holding up your heart under the wide open moon.

{for J. and for N.  and for A.  for late night texts full of wisdom and for holding my heart under countless wide open moons}

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The seizures were threatening to kill him, her only son. There was no choice. When he was in the hospital – having his skull opened to remove the tumor and during the long recovery that followed- she wore her wonder woman panties every day. Until they were as frayed and thin and worn as her weary heart. Because they were proof of what she needed to remember. She was very, very strong.

~~~

The night – when he took from her what should only ever be freely given – she watched it happen from the ceiling. When she could not bear to be inside her body for a moment longer, she left it behind. Floated high above.

Later, she kissed him goodbye, her lips parched and hard against his, aware that they were watching. After the others had long since fallen asleep the silent, shuddering tears began. She crawled up the stairs, her legs refusing to hold her any longer. Her knees scratched on rough carpet as she crawled across the bedroom in the dark, searching desperately for her overnight bag.  She knew without looking that her pink lace panties – the first pair that had made her feel like a grownup – would be stained with blood. She closed her eyes, silent tears streaming down her face, and wished for a cape. Blue and red satin, she imagined, and powerful enough that she would not have to float next time – she could fly away and never return.

~~~

Afterwards, when it was done – when the choice was made and it was over and could never be taken back – she stood in the shower. Her frail shoulders curved around her grief stained soul. She held her body, one that so recently had held another,  and she felt as if the earth might just give way beneath her feet. She waited for the hot water to scald the memories from her skin. She pounded slick tiles with her bare hands, a primal keening rising from the deep well at the center of her grief.  She was broken open, cracked wide. It was not supposed to be this way. There is no superhero in the world strong enough to alter this one irrevocable thing that she had done. This time, she would have to rescue herself.

~~~

Lover, there will be days when there are no telephone booths to change in. Days when your own personal kryptonite has robbed you of your last bit of strength. Days when Wonder Woman panties and satin capes and scalding water don’t have near enough magic to transport you back to the core of your powers.

Indeed, there will be days when the most heroic act you can muster is changing the sheets on your bed. All of your energy focused on tucking and smoothing, as if meticulously formed hospital corners are the one thing that will save your life. It matters now at the close of the day, when everything in this world feels dirty and cloaked in shame, that your skin only be touched by something clean.

This is enough. This is more than enough. 

No, you cannot really fly. There will be no single bound building leaps. You will not win a race with a speeding bullet. There won’t be a man in tights and a cape swooping down to save you. It’s just you.  One person. Small and exquisitely mortal against the relentless pressing of the big, wide world.

But know this. Even without costume or talisman or amulet, you have power beyond comprehension.  You have brokered peace treaties. You have kept intact that which was bound for disaster. You have held the hand of the dying and brought life to the world. You have brought down empires and built them anew, the right way this time.

To live this life. To live it with wholeness and gratitude and trust. In the pain and the glory.  In the mess and the grace. In the sacred and the desperation. This is the stuff of which real superheros are born.

And you. I bow to your tender heart. Your fierce ownership of self. To the battles done in the name of health and wholeness and agency and truth. To the choices made that had to be made that nobody understands. To the judgement faced and the heavy grief cradled.  To the ways you have continued, even in the face of great loss and sacred things stolen and all that has threatened your hard won peace.

It is no small thing to survive this world.  And it is no small thing to stand tall and to claim this life and to thrive.

I bow to you, humble and awed.

Because you have been the saving grace of your own survival, again and again and again. 

And in the end, there is nothing more powerful than exactly that.

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I know nothing.

She is sitting in a park when I speak these words for the first time.  I picture her there.  Worn blanket hastily pulled from the trunk and hastily thrown on cool fall grass.  Leaves overhead beginning to spiral their way into the approaching dormancy of winter.  Reverberation of slamming doors ringing in her soul.  Crisp autumn air on tearstained cheeks.   I give her the wisdom I need the most.

I know nothing.

Whisper those words with soft lips, hollow throat.  Breathe them in and breathe them out.  Let them echo in you for a while, love.  Grant them sovereignty to swirl and swoop and root down deep.   Feel the tingle of truth they raise on lips and fingertips and skin. Let them become, inside and outside and all around you.

I know nothing.

This is the lesson of my fourth decade.  The absolute lack of certainty. The unlearning of truths.  The releasing of dogma.  The submission to the wisdom of emptiness.   The surrender at the beginning of unknowing, and the grace that finds me at the end.

I know nothing.

Can you feel the freedom of that?  The lack of projection.  The release from worry and supposition and what if?  Knowing nothing gives space for letting go.  Room for continuous rearrangement.  Reconstruction. Renewal.

I know nothing.

Five years ago:  I sit in a room.  It is a retreat of wisdom and laughter and silent meditation lead by a woman who is both teacher and student.  I am barely able to contain the pieces of in-progress-destruction that are my heart and soul and life.  Our guide tell us to lift our hands in front of us.  Wiggle our fingers in the air.  “All that you can touch is all that is real” she says.  And she laughs a laugh that tastes like freedom.  I remember this now and feels it mingling with my unknowing, alchemizing along the way into something that feels like the deepest sort of knowing.

I know nothing.

These three words.  They become mantra and survival.   They become graciousness and surrender. When I wonder and worry and stress.  I know nothing. When I crash headlong into the rhetoric of my own stubborn dogma.  I know nothing.  When I don’t understand.  When I can’t explain.  When I’m about to collapse from the weight of my own expectations.  When gearing up to high speed crash into the paradox of love and loss.  I know nothing.

Iknownothingiknownothingiknownothingiknownothing.

If you breathe it deep enough, there is room for the unknowing become a singular, spacious everything.  The unknowing cracks open your heart.  It strips you of the confines of certainty.  It brings you to a fierce embrace of all that can never be known.  It leaves room for the wild soul within, the one who doesn’t concern herself with knowing, because she’s too damn busy with feeling and doing and revolutionary being.

I know nothing.  Neither do you. 

Lover, be brave enough to follow your unknowing as it spirals continuously inward and outward from the edges to the center of your existence and back again.     What you will find  – at the root of all that you do not, cannot and will not ever know – is the core of all that is.

Right here.  Right now.  Forever.

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