Surrendering to the spiral - March 2020
This morning before dawn I woke up to it: Pain for the world. Not just my pain but pain shared by so many of us.
I just laid in my bed listening to all of it. Anxiety, the bouncy one, was not there that time. Instead, many other feeling-beings were present and awake around my inner table: Worry. Fear. Grieving. And oddly, Joy showed up too, unusually quiet, this time dressed up as Curiosity, yet definitely there.
I felt or imagined, I don’t know which, myself being a tiny cell in the body of Earth. My microscopic Universe was a fractal of the larger system. Separate and small while united and boundless at the same time. Personal and collective. Mine and shared.
Then I remembered: This is not the first time I’ve felt like this. The night before I had been going through our family albums - hundreds of pictures. My baby is turning 18 and I’m making a book for him. Vivid memories from all those years colored my twilight experience:
9/11. That was the day when I was supposed to have my very first midwife check-up but didn’t. That day, those weeks were filled with ecstatic joy of new life growing inside of me along with all that collective fear and grieving. Then about a month before my due date my belly-baby’s grandmother died.
Then came time to give birth. A friend had given me the best possible advice: Surrender to the pain. Don’t fight it. That wisdom became my raft that helped me surf on the immense physical pain. There was nothing else to do than surrender to the uncertainty either. At one point our midwife told us that she could not hear our baby’s heartbeat. With the second child, our midwife told us that the baby’s heartbeat is dangerously rapid. From all that pain and uncertainty, two beautiful healthy babies were born.
Laying in my bed in this late March morning, I noticed myself surrendering to this pain again. The ground has fallen, the ground is shaking underneath our feet. We are all afraid for our health, lives, safety, loved ones, livelyhoods or lifestyles -depending on one’s circumstances. And it’s not only people that are suffering. So many species are disappearing from our planet. They have been and are dying while we’ve been busy with our human affairs, hardly acknowledging their co-existance.
Still and silent, I’m honoring my and our pain for the world.
Joy, still in Curiosity’s clothes, raises its hand and throws a little spark to my umbra moment: Seeds of life sprout in the dark.
One of my deep wisdom teachers, Joanna Macy, says: This is the time of the Great Unraveling. This is also the time of Positive Disintegration. Something had to change. Something has to change. Our busy lives, our systems have been out of balance for a long time. This is all freaking scary and painful. It is also wild and amazing.
I’m ready to start another day, surrendering to this spiral of life. Before I do, in my mind, I let my fears and worries transform into healing light, I breathe it out to the world, humans and non-humans. I hear a sound from outside: Birds are waking up, singing. May we all be healthy and well. May we all be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
