Let Us Go

Every year I return to my birthplace, my culture of origin in the suburbs outside Washington, D.C. We enter through the manicured interface of airports like the last quiet hush of personal thoughts and meditations and wishes where most other travelers distract themselves in books or personal music or sleep. It is a digital illusion this world of very limited spaces and options that confines the soul into pre-programmed outcomes while insisting through material accumulation that we are entering a world of abundance, of endless possibility. Looking up from these thoughts, pondering soul’s eventual rage as seen in the small tantrums which spike through the modern child’s day, I noticed a message scrawled by a young person’s hand in the fine layer of dust on the tall airport windows: Let Us Go it reads in 2 feet high lettering with palm print accents at the end of each letter. Let us go the graffiti reads transparent on glass, but only seen from certain angles, the dust is so fine. Let us go the message screams most likely at the waiting, a delay, the powerless of airport travel, but carrying a deeper vibration all the more rooted in our human longing by the hand-prints, the fluidity of palm making shape, giving voice and I am humbled, I am quiet because I know we all have to let ourselves go, let it all go, that there is no keeper at the gate: we have entrapped ourselves. I am here in my birth culture attempting to blend-in because I want to see my loved ones, confirm and share our love, but deep inside I am transforming and learning to let go of the pasts that haunt and hurt and fill with fear and rage. Letting go of possession, of obsession, of material consumption. Letting go of reaction, embracing observation, controlling my temper, my desire, my fear. Why do we come here, to a place I find so hard to navigate, so confusing to understand? Because it is in these temptations at 33 that I can find who I truly am, my Jesus metaphor turning allegory. It is here at my roots that I can learn to let go of rejection, of all my childhood fighting, and learn to embrace my whole that allows me the freedom to live the rest of the year in my forest sanctuary. This is not a journey of a prophet, this is a journey of my personal transformation and the letting go we each must manifest in our individual lives, or be consumed by.

Turning 33

Turning 33 and shedding skin, peeling back the layers to reveal new creation, illuminating my path before me. Turning 33 and the Catholic lessons inside me cannot help but recognize this age as the same as Christ upon his crucifixion, where his skin was shed to his base humanity: his blood, his sweat, his pain and thirst. Turning 33 with Christ as my Buddhist metaphor, my temple stands nearly complete after 2 years of physical determination and I have returned to daily meditation, reaching beyond my base humanity to harmonize with an invisible frequency that I can sense all around me, but cannot yet touch. Turning 33 I have probed the ritual of honoring sacrifice, have felt the whisper of a soul departing a body under my fingers in the evening mists that came to claim our roosters, respecting death as universal. Turning 33 and embracing my imagination, my creations as artistic, as necessary expressions of my love for life. Turning 33 humbled by my body’s limitations and learning patience in the realms of healing and health. Turning 33 and remembering the importance of graciously receiving love as equally as the giving of love. Turning 33 and preparing for travel to childhood addresses, to separate the past from the present, to remain true to myself with love and respect, shedding skins and old patterns. Turning 33 and the Moon will pass between us and the Sun, whether we see it or not, marking a moment in a grand cycle we are too young to remember, though we are learning. Turning 33, like Christ, like Buddha, and all the world’s prophets, reaching for personal transformation by shedding my Snake skin in this year of walking the edge of the Tiger’s stripes, through the physical, the emotional, the imaginative realms, while sleeping, while awake, and to learn to carry these lessons always.

My Pledge of Allegiance

As Christine always says, “Just give and receive Love. That is all we have to do.”

This Fourth of July weekend as the nation’s capital prepares for the William Tell Overture and back-lighting the monuments in clouds of pyrotechnics for the annual patriotic salute of flag waving and the glories of history, I find myself alone on a quiet night in the forest between a break in the rain making a different pledge. In the glow of a candle and a solar-charged lamp, across the quilt my mother-in-law sewed by hand, I pledge allegiance to my heart’s inner desire which expresses my eternal Soul’s place in this world, and to this true calling I commit my creative imagination to give and receive Love, without judgment, without expectation, for the freedom and the happiness of all.