Universal umbilical cord

My head’s not on fire any more, I’ve been sleeping, my body is unwinding, my mind is calmer, the heaviness in my heart has lifted, I have an exhilarating focus, I don’t feel alone, and energy and creativity course through me.

I am grateful and blessed. Prayer truly works. So does opening personal burdens to Spirit, companions and community.

Everything I didn’t have last week, I have since been given. Best of all, I have been in a place to receive.

Even the reminder shell of pain is tolerable.

During the past several weeks, I have been counseled and listened to by amazing people, including here. One suggested I was in a “dark night of the soul,” which I had not recognized as such. It has seemed more like a dark night of the mind, battling against all else. Yet I think she had a point. It’s as if my mind/ego jailed my soul and my soul was only doing what was necessary to escape: GET MY ATTENTION by any means possible.

Maybe she’s right. I have been dissatisfied with prayer, worship and my faith community, storming at God and wondering if she even exists. I can’t remember a time I had that much doubt since embarking on a spiritual path. I felt listless, purposeless and well, useless. I’ve had spells before, often precipitated by pain, but the quality of this felt very different. Before some thread (deep worship, a project, life) provided the momentum to stop the inertia. This time, I hit a wall; a wall of desperation and fallibility that mirrored my miserable self. Something bashed that reflective obstacle and freed me. I don’t know how else to articulate it. I don’t really even understand it.

But on this side is freedom … in the form of something rising internally. I understand it is of me, not me, deeply rooted and connected, like the Universal umbilical cord. My lifeline.

• How have I experienced desolation, isolation or darkness?

• What have I learned being this side of it?

• How has it changed my understanding of myself?

• My understanding of the Creator?

• What did the experience shape me?

seized

with pain

aloneness

robbed

of energy

identity

foraging

for love

understanding

offered

a different

path

that was

inside all

along

yet I had

stood in the

way