Isn’t wild how something we cannot see becomes the very thing we need the most? We are a love hungry people that live in a love hungry world. But the love we need the most, is not the kind of love that is acclaimed by our good performance and well doing but the kind of love that just is, wrapped around the wild and raw edges of our natural selves born of God, the kind of love that says yes to whatever is in the package of that squishy little being we are when we are born, before anything in the cultured world tells us to be something else.
It seems it happens quickly that we forfeit the natural inborn qualities of our raw little selves for the sometimes confusing love of the giants that surround us or perhaps simply to feel safe.
The formative years of our lives come as shape shifters through our family dynamics, wounds, trauma, abuses, social encounters, finance, politics, theologies, cultural patterns and ideals and all the like. Of course these also bring to us the gifts that cultivate the ground of our being in life and the treasures that lie beyond the sufferings.
For me, shape shifting began at a young age. I experienced a full assortment of abandonments, which led me ultimately, to doubt love and abandon myself, at least in part for another version of who I thought I was and needed to be. Of course I did not know that I was doing this. It simply felt much safer to be all the things I thought the giants in my life wanted me to be and much more convenient for them. It turned out that as I played out these roles, I hid my truest original self in the caverns of my unconscious.
These are the shadowy edges of life that I have come to realize we all face in one way or another.
Lots and lots of books have been written on this subject of love hunger and trillions of dollars have gone into its quest. But let me tell you how it all began again, for me. How I woke up to the deeper yearnings of my soul that were on the other side of my sufferings.
One night I had gone to sleep in physical pain and was woken suddenly in the dark with a flash of vision that was so clear to my eyes and so deeply felt in my soul that I rose out of my suffering into the night with a small candle light on my drawing table and began to draw as fast as I could what I was seeing.
Stunned eyes peered into me, out from behind unraveling grave cloth. Only the eyes were revealed while the rest of the being remained bound.
At that time, I had very little consciousness of the power of dreams and vision, yet this came to me in the night as real and unexpected as any night time reality crashing into my consciousness. As pencil slid across the paper in the dim light, it was revealed to me by Love that I had been bound and vision was the beginning of my healing journey.
God revealed myself and himself to me that night in the deep that calls to deep; a Divine Love that will not let us go and will not settle us into the shadow lands of our beings.
God loves the self that he created us to be, so deeply and so fully, that he will not settle us to be less. And all the inner graves and caves and hidden parts of ourselves are not where God wants us to be. We were created to live fully and authentically in our original design, to share a Love story we call life.
It’s been years of unraveling and some of my patterns, born of the sorrowful mysteries of my life, still prevail at times in the upside world, but the deeper parts of me have come alive in the rivers of God’s Spirit that are more beautiful, vivid and free than all I could have asked or imagined. And yes, I still forget. And I still am called back to remember the Love that always has been for us, and never fails to fulfill our deepest longings.
Interesting how we both consciously and unconsciously, think we are delivering ourselves from the blows of the upside world by all of our survival patterns, but in reality are only wrapping those bindings even tighter around ourselves.
Yes we still feel the pain of abandonments, hurts and trauma that come our way. They are the sorrowful mysteries of our lives. I have discovered however, that the experience of suffering is uniquely different when we are rooted in the riverbeds of Convincing Love that wraps itself around the originals that we are.
I have also come to know, that the human sufferings we bear, have nothing truly to do with how loved or not loved we are. They have more to do with the sufferings of being human and of the world of others that are hidden in the deep dark caverns of themselves and expressed in the harshness and emptiness that comes our way. It is the humanity we share.
It seems my life has been a series of deaths and resurrections, births and rebirths, forgetting and remembering.
The riveting awakening of this dream, was the beginning of a whole new unraveling.
It all began with vision.
I wonder if there has been a time in your life that you experienced being awakened by Love?