What is love if not loss?
What is joy if not pain?
What is ecstasy if not grief?
From one the other blooms.
From one the other dissolves.
What is this human life if not death?
The more time I spend in my mysticism, the more I am initiated into my humanness.
This human life…
Asking me to dance between the realms…
through the swirls…
Of lightness and dark.
Of vibrancy and dilapidation.
Of this truth and that.
Swirling between the two until there is no this or that.
There just IS.
This week was a perfect example.
I touched down in Greece to reunite with my partner and found out that Beirut as I know it was gone.
It brought me to my knees.
To feel the pain of my friends and family who keep losing and have nowhere else to go.
To feel the helplessness in myself at the vastness of the tragedy
To feel the deep love I hold for a broken city that has been kicked while it’s down.
To feel such grief for a place that is my only true home and also my truest demise.
To feel such guilt that I am not there.
To feel such relief that I made it out.
And at the same, here I was.
So taken care of.
In the arms of a man I’d dreamt of my whole life.
On one of the most beautiful islands in the world.
Yesterday, I struggled to land.
I wanted to know what I felt.
Happiness?
Despair?
Every year, life asks me to surrender just a little deeper into holding both truths.
The death that comes with life.
The loss that comes with abundance.
The exhale that comes with the inhale.
So I embrace the swirl.
the dance that is this AND that.
Yesterday, I wailed in his arms in the morning and giggled with the beach rainbow in the afternoon.
Yesterday, I prayed for Beirut in her grief and celebrated myself in my happiness.
Yesterday, I felt deep sadness for my people’s loss and immense gratitude for my own creation.
We can do both.
So come with me, darling.
Embrace the swirl.
The dance of lightness and dark.
The sway of opening and closing
The undulating that comes with breathing.
Let it fill you with life force like never before.