Alone

Nine years ago, my father told me he'd walked away from me five years prior because, "I couldn't go where you are going." He couldn't explain it any more than a feeling and a push away that was reinforced by a disembodied voice that told him, "We've got her. She'll be fine." So he chose, disappeared until I pigeon-holed him on his tractor one spring day five years later. That visit and all it's circumstances reinforced for me his decision and I adopted it as my own.

These days, that pronouncement feels like a curse. Those things that are unfolding within and around me are not offered the sanctuary of another's heart; these truths aren't attended by warm-blooded caring. There is no one to share with how the world speaks and draws breath through me. And, how, the more it does so, the less I am.

Friendships are like trying to catch a handful of fog. I maintain a few superficial relationships because I need to hang onto to something human but the depths I need can't be met in the shallows. The loneliness that accompanies this evolution is an extended drought of embodied-human connection, nestled between two mountains and a state of permanent vulnerability and loss. I long to have the full tables I used to feed and the shared awe of visitations and visions that didn't make people afraid.

I wish I could tell someone how the world speaks through me, breathes through me; lungs-full of love and pain and anguish and joy and despair and hope and roots and wind and blood-borne grief and goodness. I wish I could share how, the more it speaks, the less I am. And yet, more.

I wish I could explain how, when, someone from another country walks by me at the hardware store, the ground of their home wraps around my leg and pulls me to it, to them--those women and girls buried without distinction. I wish someone understood how my body and mind are pummeled by the forces that others take for granted or define as 'subtle' and how hard it is, how much work it takes, to want to stay here, to want to meet the prayers for which I was made in the midst of such tumult. I wish someone could hold me up the way wings and occasional hope do. I wish someone could see that the exhausting work it is to hold my own solidity within the contexts I'm forced into as much as my father felt forced away from me. Whether or not he grieved, I'll never know but I do know that I do. I grieve being believed but not being seen in my entirety and I grieve the contradictions around being prayed into being but not actually fully being seen that create their own reality. I grieve knowing that there's no one to call when trouble comes my way, the thought of not being grieved when I'm gone. Being heard enough to know 'your heart feels like it's love won't be seen' and then it isn't by the sayer. "I'm not comfortable with...," "this can't be true..." There's no lie in these things either and they, too, seem like a curse for the future.

I wish I could tell someone that the words were too much today and I had to leave the library because they wouldn't stop touching me; that they reached out to The Word who ran.

I wish I could say how it sometimes hurts me to do the things I have to do to survive so I sometimes don't want to do either. I wish I could say to someone how I'm afraid to be touched by something solid because the transfer, the communication becomes inseparable from me and that I don't think I can carry any more. I wish people weren't afraid when they see through my eyes, receive the visions I'm too tired to receive. I wish they knew that those things were as much a blessing as the 'more miraculous' miracles they wish for.

Some might call this the price of faith, of following the call of the heart, the Hearted-One, or, perhaps the cost of bull-headed determination for a future that can't even be imagined by anyone else. Maybe that makes my whole being too big for someone else, anyone else to help me carry myself or marvel at the endurance or love (or the endurance of love). Maybe while I feel as if I'll drown in the superficial, others are afraid to get to close to The Depth; that they're afraid of drowning in it's love. Maybe these encounters with a life lived so far outside imaginations tests the faith of others and all they can do is step away from it. Maybe they can't go where I'm going or meet me where I am because to do that means leaving the foundation of what they think they know. Do I have a faith so misguided or powerful that no one else can travel with me? It’s hard to know when there’s no one to have that conversation with.

Perhaps, I'll never know.

I do know that I can't be around those that hate with such ease that they can't see it. Their vernacular of fear, of other, as commonplace as talk of weather: different looking, different thinking, different access to money, different expression of the life-force is met with disdain and the demand that, "They can't upset my need for order!" It's an odd situation to be in because, often, when people are around me, they feel safe. When they feel safe, they speak their heart; their own fearful, beautiful and, perhaps, lonely hearts. I don't have the energy these days to heal those hearts, all I can do is listen in the moment, love in the moment that fear, and create space between us until I can reengage healthily because how they speak ill of one difference is reflected in my own. Projection or not, I don't have the energy for my sacred, tender spaces to be intruded upon in that way. I used to 'hold space for the crazy' but I can't now.

I know that it's an awkward, unsettling awareness to have no need for a safety plan because those, by their definition, involve the participation of others and there are no others. I know that the most holy experiences make others afraid because love doesn't appear in the way they think it should, they don't think they deserve it or it can't handle their pain.

This loneliness is it's own being; solid enough that it’s my own, my only breathing companion who permits and encourages the wholeness of Being, and pushing me out of it, when I go too deep inside, because if it doesn't, I won’t come out. The stigmata is internal and eternal, as unceasing as my bone-headed determination and anger at All Things for making me just this way, on purpose. I know the latter is the thing that informs and sustains the former but it's so hard to do it alone.