Dear One of My Sacred Heart, Blessed Daughter of the One My Girl Nichole,
I hear you sweetheart calling to me, calling to us all as you spiral in the darkness of addiction I hear you sweetheart and feel your heartbreak the loss of love, the loss of Isaiah, the loss of innocence I hear you sweetheart begging for mercy, crying for release from this cold, dark prison that keeps you separate from the love that would warm you, melt you, resurrect you I hear you sweetheart, I hear your despair, your terror, your resignation your dark thoughts, the belief that it can never be any different than this I hear you sweetheart, I hear your shame, your guilt, your deep regret for living, for breathing, for being I hear you sweetheart, I hear you entertaining ideas of suicide, of death of running until there is nothing left I hear your pain, I feel your heartbreak, I sense the unbelievable and undeniable loss you are encountering…that your oh so sweet sweet heart is experiencing And I know who you are…you cannot hide from me, you cannot hide from those that have been in your presence, that have tasted your wisdom, that have been graced by your humor and sass I will not give up on you, I am not giving up on you I love you now more than ever I will not fear you or the despair of the world that you mirror to me, my own despair and pain You will make it through this darkness Nichole God will see you through this darkness Nichole I will see you through this darkness Nichole One day you will breakthrough The shackles of the past will be gone And you will be free to live the life you are here to live I know you…you…the true you…the essential you cannot and will not be able to outrun the radical and relentless love that I have for you With every ounce of love in my heart I am penetrating the dark prison of your addiction and I am speaking right now, words of healing salve directly into your heart. You are not alone You are not alone You are not alone God and Love have not forsaken you. Surrender in all ways to the love that you are Surrender in all ways to the beauty that you are Surrender in all ways to the heartbreak and pain that you feel Come home Nichole Come home to those of us that love you, that hold the Truth of who you are…that will stay with you as you walk from the hell of addiction into the light of wholeness You were only a child honey when meth came into your life You were only a baby when you took your first trip You were only 3 when you had your first withdrawal You didn’t deserve to be hurt and abused You don’t deserve that now You deserve love You deserve a safe haven You deserve to heal, to be free from the jaws of addiction, from the burdens of your mother’s past Hear me O Sweet and Adorable One I behold your innocence I am a stand for your wholeness I will not leave you I will love you until you can love yourself I will forgive you until you can forgive yourself I will be unstoppable in loving you. Come home Nichole, come home to your Soul. God, please…perform your healing miracles in this Dear One’s life. I beg of you for mercy. I beg of you for your intervention, your healing intercession. If I have ever served you Beloved Yeshua, if I have any outstanding favors to call in. Bring this one home please, I am on my knees, tears streaming down my face I beg for your grace, your love, your mercy to descend and envelope my dear one Nichole. Please God, with the entirety of my being I make this humble supplication. Lord, hear my prayer. It is done. Tetey a Yeshua. Ameyn.
It’s 6:39 a.m. on Saturday morning…just 2 days before we turn into the new year. My heart is bleeding from the inside out…stricken by the vulnerability of oneness…experiencing the consequences of loving with a naked, unguarded heart. There is a price to pay when we disrobe, dismantle, disarm and dissolve…there are consequences to unguarding our hearts…living without the numbing coma of addiction…the frenzy of delusion and distraction. I am fully present now, in my naked heart…feeling the immensity and intensity of the human experience. As I descend from the tower of my mind…the seat of control, constriction, fabrication, illusion…into the temple of my heart…the house of love, surrender, compassion, openness…I experience vertigo, a dizziness…a loosing and a losing of control. I am not who I thought I was. Life is not what I thought it was. I have fallen into the chasm between past and future…spiraling into the truth of here and now. Where is my terrafirma? There is no solid ground…my lifeline is my heart right now and the love, the astounding love and compassion that is flowing through me…flooding me. My thoughts when followed are dead-end streets…dissolving into nothingness…meaningless islands in a dark sea of nothingness. I have lost all semblance of control…I have surrendered to my Beloved in the fullness. There is only a thread of my former self now. Am I dissolving into essence or going insane? Do I need patience and silence or Prozac and therapy? Am I becoming a slacker or resting in gentle repose? I have been turned upside down, shaken, dumped out…where are the pieces of my former self…gone. Who will put this humptydumpty back together again?
I spoke this Christmas eve about how Christ is born in the darkness. The Christ is born when our Soul enters the darkness…this is where profound miracles of love and healing occur. Christ isn’t born in our lives in the midst of our ascension….our enlightenment…no, the Christ is born in the night of God…the darkness…the lowly place…the manger of our Soul…the tomb, pre-resurrection. In my message I spoke of three aspects of this darkness…1) The place of our sacred wound, our most vulnerable place, the place where fear reigns in our psyches, our hearts…when invited, the limitless power of Christ’s love will enter this place and alchemize, fortify, sooth, salve, save, 2) The place of unknowing, the great mystery…the place where we lose our limited knowledge for the true gnosis of God. For this to occur we must swap our mental control for Divine will and a radical faith…this is where the astounding wisdom of Christic love is born, 3) The dark womb of the Mother…the place where we enter the dark, become gently dis-membered and re-membered in Christ…in the pattern and the promise of the I Am…to birth the expression of the One that we are here to manifest in the real. This is the place of the cocoon…the caterpillar turned to goop, imaginal cells searching for one another…the gestation time before the butterfly of the true self emerges.
I am in the darkness of the sacred wound, I am in the night of God, I am the goop of the dismembered self. And in the midst of this my heart is being opened, initiated further into the fires of Christic Love. I trust I am in the holy crucible, that I am held in the arms of the Beloved as I undergo this sacred alchemy. I hope to make it through this…I must trust that the Beloved of my Soul will deliver me to the Kingdom…I am ready to rest and allow the Universe to love me as the adorable one that I am…I am ready to be adored…loved into new life.
I arrived home on the 26th to one of my own Beloved’s betrayal of herself…one of the women that I have mentored and loved from Coffee Creek stole two cars from our driveway on Christmas day (one of them a brand new Prius…5 days old). I have been reeling from the heartbreak of loving someone so completely and the agony of seeing that person throw her life away time and time again. “Love always reaches, Anakha…maybe not today, or this year…or maybe not in her lifetime…but Love reaches…always. We never love in vain,” these were the words Andrew spoke to me that first night as I spiraled into my own grief, disbelief and doubt. Since that night I have been calling this young woman every hour on the hour…reminding her of who she is…how much life she still has to live, telling her how much I love her, that she is forgiven…that it is time to face the consequences, stop running and come home. I received a text message from her last night…she is ready to go in…face her life…return for another, long stay at Coffee Creek.
Can I love myself in the midst of my own self-doubt and shame? Can I love her in the darkness of deceit? Can I love my roommates as they spiral through anger, frustration and disbelief? Can I love this world and all its woundedness, in all of its injustice, in all of its glory and sublime sweetness and soul-aching tenderness?
Am I becoming a true sacred heart mystic…able to experience the immensity, intensity and intimacy of Love…or am I going to end up as pool of water dissolving into the earth…swallowed up in Sacred Love…forever? I am reminded of a book sitting on the bookshelf to my right…”Are you becoming enlightened or losing your mind?
I think that just maybe…becoming enlightened means losing your mind…putting on the mind of Christ…residing in the temple of love. Stay tuned to see…
For now, I wait for a call from this young woman…when it is time I will go get her…call the officer and escort her to jail…with as much love and grace and dignity that we all can gather. I intend to realize this part of my journey…and hers…as sacred.
God works miracles in the darkness. The Christ is born in the darkness of the Soul. This is my prayer…come my Beloved…enter my darkness, enter our darkness…birth your Sacred Love, your Sacred Wisdom, your Sacred Self in the fabric of this life.
I’ve been up since 3:33 a.m., the clock just turned 4:44 a.m. They say the veils are thinner in the early morning hours…that divine messages are making their way through…the time of the angels.
As I listen in to my thoughts…attempting to catch an inspired idea…all I hear are random thoughts….
*I am not really into Christmas anymore…I am tired of the worn out concepts, marketing jingles, tacky displays crowding the stores…I want to celebrate Christ everyday…walk in the newness of the holy birth within me, within others moment to moment. This is the Christing that is coming down. It’s an everyday, every moment celebration, inhalation, exhalation, consummation…
*Sometimes the only place I feel truly alive is on the dance floor…there I can express the fullness of my passion, my power, my desire, my rage, my sweetness. On the dance floor we expect each other to show up, to put it out there, to engage with the beat, the breath, the body. This is one of the only places in my life that feels big enough to hold the unbridled fire that is my essence. I sure hope my foot feels better on Sunday, cause I want to dance…it has now been 2 weeks of hobbling around. I am ready for this to be healed. Now!
*I have a crush…a shy, effervescent crush for the first time in years. It is really quite sweet to experience this sort of middle school adoration. Playing with flirtation in the most sweet, innocent and natural way. I can imagine her…the young me…having her first crush. In fact, I think his name was Scotty Surrat…anyway…I am smiling just thinking of being almost 40 and crushing on some stranger that I have never spoken to…we are passersby on this cosmic dance floor.
*I ate blueberry pancakes for dinner last night with my new soul friend David. I haven’t let myself eat pancakes in years….yummmmm, they were so good. I think I ate 3 of them…with syrup. David is medicine for my soul…he is helping me unwind, relax, eat pancakes, let go, heal and reveal….there is much to say about David…our relating and what is occurring as we introduce each other to the sacred, to the intimate — and I’ll save that for later. We come from different planets, he and I, …we are creating a new language, the one of union, of God embodied, of sacred intimacy…God, Self, Other…The Naked Heart puja received rave reviews…stay tuned, we are stirring up more divine beauty and sacred ecstasy of the intimate nature for 2008!
*I am craving the silence…craving my time in uninterrupted union with Yeshua and the Divine. I am ready to dive in to the sweetness of silence and solitude during the time of the turning…between Christmas and New Year’s….sink in, relax, be, listen, groove with the sounds of harmony, receive, praise, bless, create. I am ready for the fullness of my mystic’s heart to open…to fill and be filled.
*I will be having a reading of an excerpt from my new book in February…I am thinking of having it on Valentine’s Day…since it is all about becoming love…sacred devotion, intimacy, union, and all the landscapes we travel on this divinely human journey into the embodiment of Love’s presence…stay tuned for the date and the location. Chocolate promises to be involved.
*Sometimes I grow tired of hanging out with myself…I dream about being somebody totally different…but then I would miss who I am…so I quickly toss out those imaginings and throw my arms around myself…promising to never leave me…truly, most days…I find myself and my life to be quite interesting, intriguing…at least on the inside, which is where it really counts. I travel to some amazing places…the sweet and treacherous landscape of my soul.
Okay, enough naked heart random rambling. Not much holy inspiration…a few confessions.
I am wanting to deepen into this time of Christ’s birth…to receive in essence, the new life that Mary ushered in on that silent night, that dark night so many years ago.
I love myself. I love you. I love myself. I love you.
Christ is in our midst!
In my hallucination I saw my beloved’s flower garden In my vertigo, in my dizziness In my drunken haze Whirling and dancing like a spinning wheel I saw myself as the source of existence I was there in the beginning And I was the spirit of love Now I am sober There is only the hangover And the memory of love And only the sorrow I yearn for happiness I ask for help I want mercy And my love says: Look at me and hear me Because I am here Just for that I am your moon and your moonlight too I am your flower garden and your water too I have come all this way, eager for you Without shoes or shawl I want you to laugh To kill all your worries To love you To nourish you Oh sweet bitterness I will soothe you and heal you I will bring you roses I, too, have been covered with thorns.
My dear friend Gene said to me today, “I think its about time we admitted we don’t really know anything, that we are all starting from scratch when it comes to loving one another.” I nodded my head, I really couldn’t agree more….
I see the struggle we are having in our attempts to love one another…to fulfill the Christic commandment, to live as love, to reside in peace. Today, having rode my own demons all the way down…courageously facing my own shadow…I am more prepared than ever to love completely, to love without condition, without projection, without misguided expectations. Yes, having faced myself, my fears, my darkness, my distortions, I have fallen in love with myself again, wholly, truly and I am now courting the question of how to be love, give love, activate love with you…
My heart is soft…like the petals of a flower…innocent again…free to love another, because I love myself…I’m innocent again. These are words to a song I wrote with Blaine Moody several years ago. I have now found my way into living these lyrics…Innocent Again.
My heart is registering the call to love…the revolution of the heart…a global metanoia. Love is the only way to grasp another human being. Here it is again…the choice…to see with the eyes of love or to stay clouded with the smoky and distorted haze of fear. Remove the plank from your own eye before you condemn the sliver in your brother’s. Jesus has been quite clear about his stance on owning up to our fears and projections. When you see a sliver…it is time to look for the plank. Yes, it is much easier to believe it is about another…when really the truth is that what we see outside so painfully mirrors what we have denied inside we can hardly stand it. We’d rather disassociate and project the pain somewhere else rather then step inside the darkness and resurrect the wholeness that is hidden there. Christ was born during the darkest time of the year…Christ is born again in the dark places within us…this is the fertile veritas of Christ’s Love.
From Thomas Merton…
“Love is the only answer. But medieval talk of love does nothing. What does love mean today? We have to love in a new way, with a new attitude. and I suppose perhaps the first thing to do is to admit that I do not know the meaning of love in any context — old or new.”
My question from my 40 day retreat remains…”how can I truly love another, my sisters and my brothers, to exchange the essence and the vibration of love, that will re-root, re-route, re-vitalize…resurrect? This is what I have come to learn, this is what I have come to offer. The questions and their answers. The wound and the salve. The lock and the key.
This journey into sacred love is finally and completely and ever-so-beautifully opening me….setting me free. I am humbled, I am gratefull and yes, today I am free.
My belly is screaming I love you, I love you, I love you. I am wanting to tell all the lovers in the world, I love you. I am so in love today…I have broken free…I have crossed over, I am in Eden before my fall. There are so many amazing hearts and souls in my life, in the Life. Each one different, unique…each bearing, baring their gifts, their desires, their burdens with such beauty, with such truth. We are works of art…broken-hearted, open-hearted….grieving, revealing, desiring, yearning, healing, journeying, moving, opening, constricting — glorious divine art. I am feeling the magnitude and the power of embodied love swirl in my belly tonight, moving upward into my heart, dancing figure eights around my eyes, changing my vision…
There is a choice, we have a choice. To see and perceive with the eyes of Love or remain clouded with the smokescreen of fear. Love’s vision or fear’s vision? Moment to moment, what will it be? The path is that clear…yet the choice is not always that easy. We become haunted by the voices of the past, the lies of the present, all the prisons of the mind’s worrying, struggling, fretting. This love is penetrating my prisons, my past, my heartbreaks, the lies…the chains are off, the bars have come down. I stand naked and stunned in the cell that used to hold my life. I look around and suddenly find myself in the field…you know the one…out beyond right doing and wrongdoing…the field where we meet again…divine lovers…the garden with no gate.
Love’s vision is taking me, taking me places inside and outside. I am being overcome with the ocean…this drop, this precious drop of me has made it back to the Source…the drop, the wave, the ocean united. I am swimming in love…suffocating with the intense pressure coming from within, wanting to be freed. I love you beloveds…I wish to behold your sweet faces in my hands, cupping your tenderness, soothing your worries, holding your hearts like the precious ruby gems that they are. There is such sweetness in sacred intimacy….when we let go, drop in, disarm, disrobe…reveal, dismantle…dissolve. When we become the naked heart, we melt into presence, we overflow with effervescence, we rise again together in radiant love.
My body is becoming a host to Love’s presence, no longer separated from this dance with the Beloved. Yes Blaine, everything is indeed holy now.
Yeshua has made good on his promise to give me his very own sacred heart….to make the sacred trade…my life for his heart. I vow to make good on my end of the deal. To donate myself, again and again…to the fire’s of Christic love.
I am dark chocolate. Deep, rich, still, solid. Being depth. Bringing depth. Bringing sweetness from the dark depths of my heart. I carry the mysteries. The mysteries of the sacred heart. These are teachings whose time has come. I took the Eucharist this morning, and offer my prayers…. Andrew says I am training the “light” on the wound…the Christic wounds… I direct Christ to enter into the core of my insecurities, my inauthenticities, my fears. I ask for this radiant Christic love to penetrate my darkness To turn it into dark sweetness. To make a love elixir that will awaken the hearts of my brothers and my sisters. During the Eucharist this morning I hear Yeshua say, …you have the key…
unlock the teachings now
begin writing them. My monkey mind worries about how this will pay my rent, my car payment… Trust…Surrender…Trust. I am dark, rich, sweetness. I have mysteries to reveal. I carry the forbidden I will do my part to bring Eden back. We are dropping in again…. into the mystical depths, where what was hidden will be revealed in word, in flesh. The Kingdom is coming… Christ is here now. Christ is alive in me now. Christ is in the world now… as you, as me, as we. I confirm this with my entire being. We are love, we are love. Come, I know you are tired… this is the way…the way of Love’s salvation. Amen.
Jack is one of my best friends in the world…he has been with me since the early days of seminary and has been my teacher on the mystic’s path. He teaches me about the wildness, about unencumbered adoration and affection, he demonstrates single-minded focus…ball, ball, ball, ball, ball, ball! I love this little being…a soul-mate for certain. I picked Jack up after dance last night…I hadn’t seen him in a week or so…he ran out and put his paws around my neck…was clinging to me with a fierceness that said…take me with you. He is lying next to me now…doggy snoring…one paw on my arm. I am grateful for Jack…for all the joy and all the love and all the outrageousness he has brought to me. I am not sure how much he likes the new place…he certainly is not so fond of Jimmy’s wire haired datsun, Frankie. Frankie seems to be in love with Jack and runs up to jump on him (she is all of 3 or 4 inches tall) and barks incessantly. Jack bares his teeth and growls at her….really quite grumpy and pissy. He doesn’t know or seem to care that Frankie is the peace troubadoor’s dog and that he really should be more friendly and loving. That is what I love about Jack…he just allows himself to be what he is…I see him go through different emotinal states…sad, scared, excitement, love, agitation….he just let’s be.
I find myself back to Let it Be, Let it Be….there will be an answer. Let it be, let it be. Why am I blogging at 4:12 a.m.? I don’t know…let it be, let it be.
