This is a different entry. A different post after a very long time of silence. Quietude is good. But there is a time to come out and speak. And in the speaking, listen to your voice as if you have never heard it before. Who knows, maybe you never have?
Autumn found me growing. Twisting and changing like roots far beneath the cavernous oak tree that is my life. I dreamt of life there, seeing myself like a fetus—clutching at the branches, which wrapped around my torso, my legs, and my arms. My hands became chafed, bloody, and sore from the constant struggle. Oh yes, there were moments of respite. And these moments were glorious. I experienced periods with my true Self. A Higher Self of authenticity which has been seeking to emerge for far too long. Visibility, recognition, not by others as much as by myself. This was the key to me not losing myself in the currents of nesting vines in my hair and biting limbs scraping my sides.
I began to realize important pieces of truth about nonviolence. Studying the four gunas, the four energy levels that place nonviolence at the top, I came to realize I had not been practicing nonviolence. This moment of despair and realization left me confounded and dizzy. My head felt full of cotton the morning after I experienced a rage out which involved two different people via phone calls. I found myself in full immersion within the third guna-Violence. I called my dear mentor and friend Ken at Pace e Bene and he congratulated me for not living in Avoidance, Accommodation—the first and second energy levels respectively. Whoopee. I am so glad I have graduated to Violence, I thought. Yet, I did feel this shift was important and moreover, a pull was guiding me. This pull, which had been like a benevolent guide through loneliness, joy, and everything in the liminal state. One could call it my Virgil to my Dante. He, sometimes carrying me up the terraces—through purgation—sometimes offering pieces of wisdom, sometimes nudging me to answer the question ‘who am I?’
But I digress, and I am dizzy yet again. Dizzy with overwhelm and paralyzed in feeling. For what I really wanted to write about was a person of yesteryear. Yet, for some reason I find myself choking on words, and my fingers frozen at this keyboard. Thus, I will just remember him and smile in gratitude for his memory. I learned too much at one time and suffered a bit at once. This has always been my problem—doing things too fast, not allowing for the process to happen for me. And so I lost him. I am not the same since and not sure if I want to be. So it is.
Still, I have learned more about nonviolence in this last year than I ever have. Not only from this experience of a “him”, but from the trip to the Middle East, the vigil at the School of the Americas, crossing the line at the Nevada Test Site, demonstrating at Creech Air Force Base against the drones, to name but a few. I have participated in a nonviolent training program through Pace e Bene. This program has forced me to go deeper than I thought was possible. Ah, but now I bore myself with details and find that I am not writing from my heart.
The heart: what I reconnected with and opened after years of cold and winter. The autumn found me beneath the cavernous oak tree that has been my life. Twisting and turning amongst the roots, the branches that have held me back for so long. But only one mattered, the umbilical cord which wrapped round my outstretched hand. This fibrous cord pulled me out of my underground past. Lifting myself up above ground, I had hit the path running. Now it is time to keep the momentum and come out of the silence.
Yesterday, March 19, 2010, marked a day of invasion. Seven years since the beginning of the Iraq war. It also marked a day of departure of a person in my life. One year. Peace, be still: A moment of silence for all those who have lost. For all those who have and are still suffering. A moment of reverence and homage to the Great Mystery, for all the beauty that comes into our lives unannounced.
