As we move through the second half of life, a new voice will often emerge, pouring out through our longing, our grief, our anger, and our disappointment. A figure from deep in the soul.
To hear and respond to that call, we have to slow down and listen through the veil, beyond the noise and density of the collective, and the matrices of intergenerational trauma and trance.
It takes courage to listen to the soul and to take it seriously. To cultivate a real devotion to the messages it is sending to us. We are called into this devotional place by way of our dreams, our study and practice, and through prayer, ritual, dance, art, creativity, and being a parent, a teacher, a lover, and a friend.
It can be a lonely journey at times, as if there is no one who can truly understand us. We turn to look for the Friend though they are not there.
But the Friend is near, even if unable to be seen.
Holding and tending this aloneness, and the grief that accompanies it, lies at the very heart of archetypal process of death and rebirth, and the truth that all healing is relational in its essence.
There can be no unity or oneness without there first being an experience of separation. Otherwise, union would have no meaning. They co-arise together, where a subsequent union lays the seeds for a more subtle separation, and then a more subtle union, and on and on.
Separation and multiplicity are just as holy as oneness and union; they are equally valid emanations of the Beloved.
There is no end to the depths of the human heart. We don’t wiggle into some sustained transcendent state where we’re “permanently” awakened, gone beyond the reality that the Beloved will pull the rug out from underneath us, in order to draw us nearer, and to reveal more of its essence.
In the end, love seems quite uninterested in our fantasies of permanent transcendence.
Even as we may yearn to rise above our embodied sensitivities, emotional wounding, and relational trauma, on the alchemical path they are the prima materia, the required matter, soaked with spirit, and portals into the depths of Soul.
Art by Stefan Keller
