It has been so very long since I have written here. I just lost the words. My life is in transition and I have been floating in one of those liminal places, neither quite here nor quite there. Twixt sea and shore, earth and air. A creature of mist and melancholy.
The house finally sold, that Bonkers House so dear to my heart. I purged my belongings, feeling fondness as they went to new homes, to new lives. Then the day came and those things I couldn’t quite part with were taken to be put in storage. It felt so strange, insane almost, this idea of a unit somewhere filled with the trappings of my old life. I had a sudden urge to ask the removal man to just dump it all entirely.
I left the house, with a suitcase trundling behind me and an air ticket in my pocket. Heading on a journey, a three-part journey in search of an answer to the question that was twirling round my head. Now what? NOW WHAT? More than half way through life and as at sea as a teenager.
My journey was going to take me, first to India, to the ancient hills of Rajasthan; then to the heart of Portugal and finally to Wales. This was not a conscious journey but an unconscious one. I did not choose the retreats in which I was participating: they chose me. Life was tapping me on the shoulder, or maybe in the heart, and whispering, ‘This, this, this is what you need to do; this is where you need to go.’ And so I obeyed. What else could I do?
What a journey it has been. What bliss, what joy, what moments of both total transcendence and earthy embodiment. What blessings. Truly, I don’t know where to begin, how to tell you what has nestled in my heart and stroked my face and tingled my bones over these six precious weeks. All I know for good and certain is that it has been a journey of Love. A journey that leads, through the labyrinths of light and shadow to the fortress of the heart. A journey that dismantles the domination of the ego and shatters the carapace of guilt, shame, doubt, blame.
“There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken, a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable. There is a sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy and a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength. There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being. There is a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges cut the heart as we break open to the place inside which is unbreakable and whole, while learning to sing.” Rashani