Incoming!!#&*)<#!

…and they lived happily ever after

“The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.” ~W. H. Auden~ Poet (1907-73)

How’s it going for you right now? If you are like most of us (me included), it is getting pretty intense. It seems like one thing after another is popping up and sweeping through my life. Life is a bit like standing in the middle of a war zone while bombs explode all around, not sure whether to duck and cover, dart left or right, or flip the channel and hope the screen changes to a more benign picture. Sound familiar? What happened to happy endings and walking off into the sunset happily ever after?

The ground I stand upon is breaking apart quickly now. The last holdouts of ego are being burnt away. Evidently when I invited God to clean house, He took me seriously. Everything I still held dear, my relationships with family, the lives of loved ones, financial where-with-all, everything with the one exception of Love itself, is vacating the premises. And, it is painful. There are no white knights coming to save me and I have no hope that the cavalry will be coming round the corner anytime soon. I wrote a note to a friend yesterday and it says it all. (I am glad she is a good friend … can’t imagine getting a note like this one.)

“I feel like I am sitting in the fires of hell burning down to the last puff of smoke … painful it is to say the least. Details aren’t important. Thank you for your love and warm embrace. We all need those around us to hold the space as life has its way with us. Ours is to be with what is regardless of the contents. Most of us think that if we listen to the Divine voice we will be protected. Not exactly true. We will be present … which is another way of saying alive instead of being dead (caught in illusion) or not being with what is. That’s all I know right now. Listening doesn’t make life Good. It makes us alive, capable of being here for each other. It is only mind that believes life should be other than it is and that is in the fire. I can smell it crackling and sizzling on the coals.”

Standing amidst the incoming volleys is the most courageous of human acts. Choosing to neither run nor hide, but to stand right in the middle and feel the pain is hard but, not doing it is unthinkable to me. That would mean consciously choosing to be absent. Maybe that is why anti-depressant use has doubled in the last few months. They dull our experience of life and make it appear more bearable. Life is painful. Life isn’t always joy and happiness. It includes watching the suffering of others and being present to their pain and to our own as well. But, if we aren’t going to be present, we are simply one of the dearly departed – absent and incapable of being of service to each other.

I wish I could get a hold of the Brothers Grimm. I would ask them if they knew what they were doing when they wrote all those fables that programmed little children to believe life is a wonderful fairytale with a happy ending. Perhaps they lived on a less remedial planet and had access to the advanced information that is only available once this part of me that is separate burns away. Maybe they knew what I am only now glimpsing, that once the vessel is purified, life simplifies, and all that remains is Love. Perhaps once the last embers turn to ash, there will be greater understanding. Running and hiding or revoking permission is out of the question. I choose life with all of its messiness, with all of its potential. I am here. Perhaps that is the white knight – being present. I hear the bluebirds singing their happy tune and the sunset is stunning. Can you see it?

“For those who immerse themselves in what the fairy tale has to communicate, it becomes a deep, quiet pool which at first seems to reflect only our own image; but behind it we soon discover the inner turmoils of our soul – its depth, and ways to gain peace within ourselves and with the world, which is the reward of our struggles.” Bruno Bettelheim ~ child psychologist and author (1903-1994)