To Be Able

Being mostly on my own during these intense Covid times, I find both my solitude and times with a friend or family to be of special significance.  Wasting time or meandering through life seems to have disappeared.  I am always accompanied by the call to be able to heal.  We have endless needs that have not been seen to, and people everywhere want to be heard. 

When I go into my garden, my plants encourage me to tend to them, and I can tell that they love to be alive.  I like to drive through the countryside and breathe in the air of the fields and cherish the sight of old wooden barns.  The sacredness of nature is paramount in me as the sense of the destructive force of man's corruption is also with me. 

But my most urgent work has to do with the healing of my other intelligence--the illusive one who is shy and sad but wants to participate in my life.  I am able to get close to her when I am able to remember that her well-being is essential to me.  When I do get close to her the feeling of sorrow is so powerful that I do not know how she has survived by herself inside me all these years. 

I have always suffered from her presence, but my pursuit of happiness has always been to avoid her.  Little by little, as I began to learn more, I began to notice that she was very interesting.  She was the one who could see with eyes of compassion.  She was the one who was really intelligent, not full of fear of making a mistake like I was.  She was the one who could dance and respond to others with spontaneity.  She was the one who gave me impressions full of life. 

Having learned all this, the price for my inner freedom is to learn how to remove the barriers that separate us.  I am developing an instrument of mutability--the capacity to be conscious of time that is happening all at once. I am here as an old woman, but I am here as a child. 

My inner situation requires me to study her wordless voice that I have access to through our shared imagination.  It makes pictures full of stories of emotional unhappiness, like a bad dream or a fairytale when the wicked witch casts a spell – a spell that shades all my inner and outer perceptions – and I begin the complicated process of judging, discounting, defending, and doubting. 

Over my years of study, I have developed a bond of trust between my duality and have learned my imagination is not a good place to look for reality.  I now have a clear sense of what I want for myself: the inner grace of being united.