Thoughts from the end of summer

I feel a heaviness when I think of home. A soft sorrow when I think of my grandmother kneeling alone in prayer, visioning our lives so far and separate and incomprehensible.
A certain heaviness when I think of my father, trapped within cages of his own making, a life of battling shadow. And what treasure there is in easing within the dark with humbleness of heart – he is yet to know this gift. There is no transcendence without disintegrating first. The only light that’s real is the light that emerges from shadow.

Heaviness when I feel my mother’s fear like a sinking stone, a constriction in the chest. Lack of breathing. I wish I could breathe deeper for her, breathe into her that fear is the game of illusion this world plays on us, that fear is a wall of mind, construct of imagination. It takes seconds to shatter.

Even though I am of this home, born out of a strange melting of love, grief, pain and betrayal, lust and also prayer and hope, I feel no weight pressing on the back of my skull, no weighing down. I am witness to the unfoldings yet I take no part in them. For home is wider than that, home is magnificent. There is work to be done here and that work cannot be done with a spine weighed down by circumstance and chance, by small sorrows of the heart.

I feel with clarity the pain and beauty too, the tenderness and love to what, and to who is home to me. Like a marbled statue, I make way for this feeling like the mountain makes way for rivers to carve through his stone-body, I make way for each feeling, no grasping, but holding home yet knowing the greater story that transcends its limits.

What is spoken into word is released. With naming the very thing that hides within us, it loses its power. The spell is broken when we are fearless in the facing of it. There is no other way than this sacred way of heart.