Finding Ecstasy in the Deepest Pain
Is about total surrender to the present moment.
I think of some of the most difficult times of my life. The saddest day so far lands on January 31, 2012. I awoke with the thought: today is the day we bury mom.
The phone rings. I don’t want to answer it but know I have to; my aunt on her farm, thousands of miles away. I can still remember her voice so broken and small. There wasn’t really anything to say but hold the space for her pain and her tears at losing her younger sister and not even being able to be there for this rite.
I felt an incredible weight on me and a strong desire to reject what was going to happen on this day. As if that were a possibility. She was gone. Wasn’t the hardest part over? Except we can’t ever know what lies ahead of us, positive affirmations be damned.
But.
Something of an ecstasy can be found in the richness of an experience, and dissolving into the depth and rawness of the truth. Because there will be moments when we know that life will never be the same again. No words, no wishing, no action, no denial, will change what is now so.
Two weeks later and it’s my father’s birthday. It’s been a somber, tender time. Mom’s absence is so palpable and yet it’s still so recent that she remains a kind of wispy, sad presence. We are a…
