Certain Surrender
”When you hurt under the surface
Like troubled water running cold.
… I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, but I was just kidding myself.”
~ Lewis Capaldi
Every day I wake into the same arms that lull me to sleep. I breathe life through this body - wish the world health and happiness - forgive those who have harmed me and ask for the same from those I have harmed (knowingly and unknowingly).
I rise.
As is my habit, I bring a cup of coffee to the porch and read the mantra of the day. A Course in Miracles has been a potent practice for a few years now, vitally useful in diffusing the obstacles and misunderstandings of my thought process - the beliefs and perceptions that kept me searching far away from my purpose.
I’ve come to realize that the only goal in life is to awaken to the singular Love called by many names - God, Atman, Buddha Nature, Tao, Knowing and so on - and that this awakening is a process of acceptance (I let go), compassion (I give) and forgiveness (I receive). It's the very same cadence that wakes spirit into this body every morning, like moon into sun and spring into summer. And, in this way, one could say that Love is a process of creation - moksha, liberation, freedom - which allows thought to willingly die into the arms of faith in the knowing that we will rise again.
Still, I struggle to hold on as I am pulled, like some under-toe, into uncertain depths!
It is my understanding that there is nothing outside of this Self with a capital ‘S’ that can save us or judge us, including the idea of God. And though we are saved by the realization that ‘I am not this body - not this mind ... I am more than I can understand' - it is, nonetheless through self forgiveness that this truth and relationship is restored.
As such, purpose is not outside any experience - not trapped in the past, not waiting in the future - but here, imbedded in this very moment. And, in this way, how we choose to respond to this moment becomes the singular action that will either catapult us into freedom or keep us caught in the stasis of right or wrong, in some thought of future salvation – separated from Love.
If I could accept that the thought – ‘I’d rather be doing something else’, or ‘I want my old life back’, or ' if only life was [fill in the blank],' - was not my function, then I would be released - I could ascend through the process of this very Purposeful Love.
I thought about my day with my parents. My mother, 79, diagnosed with Dementia and my father, at 84, beginning to suffer from the tremors of Parkinson's and from the sorrow of a lost Philia in his marriage.
I arrived agitated: I had not slept for weeks - listening to the scratching squirrels in the attic -- had just finished responding to papers completing the semester, had just begun to bring the house back to the order … had just needed to return to the life I had before the nightmare of COVID. Indeed, from this separate perspective, there was much I had to do that was standing in the way of my purpose, like writing this book. I had never written a book and knew nothing of the process, still, it called!
Ping! At this thought my Outlook box sounded and something drew me in to look … it was the University announcing a workshop that defined publishing agreements and open access. Mind wandered into another thought, 'this must be a sign!'
I returned again to the mantra, “My only function is the one God gave me.” I could see how it came to relieve me from the thought about my parents and all that this ‘me’ longed to ‘do’.
I had left my mother the day before lying on her bed with a warm compress relieving the pressure of an abscess that lay right at the edge of her sternum - the 3rd chakra, the solar plexus of nerves that came together as a network of pain and healing, her body no longer forgiving.
Dementia was eating at her sense of meaning, and the only urgency were the memories that returned to her which requested my attendance, a mystical ritual of shared wisdom.
She spoke of her poverty as a young girl during the Greek Civil War, how her family fled from the city to the village when it began – named her brothers and sisters – and expanded on her studies at the university. But she had never gone to college, though she desired greatly to grow her knowledge of the world and connect with the vision of a purposeful career, she was destined to marry my father at 18 and travel across the ocean to the US - to plant the seed of the matriarchy that carried these words.
... these words that longed for forgiveness “before you go”. (CS)
As I lingered in the memory of this message, I sensed my father stir in the kitchen – could feel the flooding terror that had overtaken his heart and mind as it processed our conversation.
This entire moment was under the power of some invisible, indivisible, Divine Love. And, it was clear that I could not access it until I relinquished the ideas and thoughts that it was somewhere else – somewhere beyond the resentment of being parentified – caring for my mother’s body, responding to the minutia of their economy and household, and the inability to respond to my father’s growing grief. Shame arrived, I welcomed that too; it felt as still and as silent as the tears welling in him as he walked me to the car.
"... was there something I could have said to have made it all stop hurting?" (LC)
I could see how the thought of ‘why me’ conspired with the inability to hold and touch him and how it was interfering with my function as witness to the impossible thoughts – that his wife of 61 years was disappearing - that he was alone - that 'what' it had meant had disappeared with her like a dream, and that we were left with the task of allowing something new to be created from this charnel ground.
All this, this singular purpose. Nothing else.