I'm reading a compelling book right now titled The Spirituality of Imperfection. It addresses the exquisite paradox of the human condition, and it's helping me reconsider my current emotional state.
The book cites spiritual premises from all the major religious traditions which point to 'brokenness' as the point at which human consciousness encounters the divine. As humans we yearn for control, but we are powerless. We cling to constancy, but everything changes. We long to be whole, to be filled, to be complete, but we often feel empty and lacking. We go to great ends to avoid pain, and by so doing, create exceedingly complicated and painful situations for ourselves. Perhaps at the most fundamental level, we search for some solution to avoid our inevitable mortality, or at least make some sense of our time here on earth.
This book jumped out at me from the shelf, because I've been in a fragile state of mind for the past few weeks.
It has been more than a year since the official end of my relationship with Montenegro, and though we still live together, I feel our lives daily drifting further and further apart. The sensation of loss some days is nearly unbearable. I have difficulty comprehending the world or my place in it. My heart is utterly shattered.
It's something I don't discuss any more with friends, with Montenegro. After all, what is left to say? What I wrestle with now is the flailing of my own soul.
My last tenacious hopes that this is all somehow just a bad dream, that it will end any time now, are finally crumbling. The torch of denial I've been carrying is one worthy of the name alcoholic.
And at the same time, I'm not blind to the many good things that exist in my life. I have much to be grateful for, and I try to be. This isn't a jag of self-pity. This is bone-crushing existential grief.
How the book I'm reading relates to all of this is that it has given me permission to just feel everything I'm feeling. Maybe I should be over my break up by now, but I'm not. It still hurts--a lot--and the pain is profound. It's spiritual because at last I'm feeling it--I'm not drinking it away, hiding behind a smoke screen. There is nowhere to run, and I just have to face it, wave after wave after wave, like some merciless alchemical ocean...
So much of my life has been spent doing what I think others expect me to do. Now I awake to the agoraphobic truth that no one really expects anything of me. I am completely bewildered as where to go and what to do next.
I find myself moving around the burnt out shell of a former life. The rooms are different, the quality of the air. The house itself is uneasy.
And for those who might argue, criticize (myself included) that this is just trumped up bourgeois melancholy, that nothing is really wrong,
that I should just get over myself... To those I say "no".
What I'm feeling is as real as anything anyone feels. It arises authentically from
my depths like weather. It shapes my experience and understanding of
life, of the universe, of the divine. It is not pouting. It is not
some nursery room temper tantrum...
What beats in my chest is a human heart--one prone to irrationality, passion, joy, to creativity, fear, lust, exhilaration. I have been fighting being human my whole life, and that too, ironically, is a very human thing to do.
Normally, this would be the point where I try to wrap up all these disparate threads into some sort of sage, serene knot, but today I'm not going to do that. I'm simply presenting myself authentically, where I'm at, flaws and all. There's nothing to be fixed, nothing to be managed, nothing to get under control--this is just the raw ride of life.
Passion, beauty, and love, folks--24 hours at a time...
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