Dietar Temps: Madagascar, young boys

Two shocks of white hair descend from the side door of the couple’s neighboring house and disappear behind our tall white fence. In February, during Lent around this time last year, the man of this pair attacked Christopher. He took offense at how the plum bushes between the lots had been trimmed. He knocked on the door wearing brass knuckles, and when my beloved let him in, he tried to hit him. Christopher wrestled him to the floor just as his wife came over yelling, “Stop! Stop!”

Since then, they ignore us and we ignore them back, as the court order proclaims we should. I remember Christopher working through both the sore back muscles from wrestling this man safely down and all the emotions that stormed him afterward. Should he press charges? She’d begged him not to, and it did seem like the best course of action would be like what Christopher physically did: Protect himself from harm but not attack back.

Still.

I tire of this. My breath’s a fast, hard had-enough. I want to cut through all the BS. But there is timing in all life that’s sacred—and too slow for my liking.

And then I see my beloved meditating. I stop to go kiss him. He seems a miracle then, I swear to you. Tried and true. I’m confused, imbalanced by his presence so late in our lives, especially his. And yet his heart soars out through his blue eyes as they kiss me back, truer than true. Nothing about life makes any sense, not really. It’s our mind’s natural quest for order that’s made a mess of it all. The pure moment’s a place beyond categories. I wear my grandmother’s gray wool cashmere cardigan and type into the purr of an electric heater at my feet.

Last night, I couldn’t sleep. Energy poured into my body and I tingled like a kid awake before Christmas. I called in helpers. I listened to a lovely hypnosis recording by Rebecca Welsh of Boulder Valley Hypnotherapy, then opened a Perelandra Medical Assistance Program (MAP) team—guides from nature and spirit aiding me in my quest toward health. I used my meditation beholding too, in which I call out an aspect of myself that’s harboring some false belief based on a bad experience, and I dialogue with her.

At my core was pure fear and trauma. With my MAP team’s help, and working directly with this fear, I let the fear melt and release.

I’ve come to think of these moments as ego deaths. A very big aspect of myself surrenders its control, its roll, and submerges into the bigger self, the self without end.

When this happens, I feel like I’m dying. I hyperventilate and the soundtrack sounds a lot like: “I’m gonna die…I’m gonna die…I’m gonna die…” All the while, I’m birth-death coaching myself, saying “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s going to be okay.” At last, I surrender and go under. And I’m reborn without this clinging in-charge aspect of my ego. She lives on in my expanded consciousness, taking it all in.

I think maybe it’s practice for the big enchilada, the passing from this world to the next. Same surrender. The cool thing seems we can do it a little at a time so that—when it’s our time—it’s less of a grand occasion and more a stepping through a door.

Dearly beloved. My beloved is not only Christopher, but me, and Jesus, this Earth, and my life. My beloved is my typing soft fingers, the tilt of my head perched on my achy, breaky heart. My beloved on a small branch, taking it all in.

My beloved is compassion for those two white heads bobbing down the narrow stairs. It’s waking up, even as we would sleep. It’s being here, now, and seeing you, God, in this life as in everything, for the very first time…yet again.