So simple, so amazing: a journey into awareness
Chapter 13: Time to Be Happy Is Now
I used to live life looking down, you taught me to look up. I want to say thank you. I love you. I see you, I believe in you, and as long as we’re together there’s nothing we can’t do. (Sense 8)
When I lived at our old house, the light bulb reflecting on the bathroom wall made an image of a tiny high window. Thinking the worst, I thought it was a prison cell window. I thought that perhaps I was in prison but didn’t realise it. Maybe that was true. But now, instead of looking ‘down’ or ‘backwards’, to something worse than my current situation, it’s the other way around.
From where I am right now, which is good anyway, I am seeing windows and doors everywhere, windows and doors to something even better. Walking around the town I notice haylofts, alley ways with little gates, high lit up windows and huge wooden doors.
If self analysis and ruminating about the past is like trying to untangle a ball of wool that a kitten has played with*, then it suddenly dawned on me that I could just chuck it out and buy a fresh ball. I could forget all my mother’s conditioning about recycling and not wasting and just go out and buy a new one. Or even decide that I don’t like knitting after all and go and do something else.
*As I was thinking this, I saw a sparrow pecking one of those mirrors people have to help them reverse out of their driveways, it kept flying around to look behind, then back again to the front and pecking, totally futile. A much better metaphor (than I could have made up) than the tangled ball of wool, for our endless introspection (re the past) and navel gazing.
Saturday morning in bed, talking, in the moment, really in the moment, so that we felt like two Gods looking down at what we had created. Reviewing our lives, how we got here, what we gave to each other (money and security, fun and happiness). What we mean to each other now that we don’t need anything. Experimenting with the idea of letting each other go, to travel separately, to take a job in another country. Even thinking the unthinkable, the possibility of separating: Maybe my work is done here John said, we had a good run. Is this how divorce happens, just an idea that gets spoken aloud? Of course not: you fight, and make each other unhappy. We are not like that.
Long talk with John about setting ourselves free, e.g. selling the house, moving away from the kids: what would you do if you only had one life? Both felt tingly all over. Looked up properties and jobs in Scotland just to get in the zone of putting it out there, that we are up for it…
Enjoying friendships more, finding friendships more satisfying, even though one might think the opposite would be true. Realising that this world and most of the people in it are illusionary doesn’t lessen the pleasure I get from nature or good company.
I saw a black and white cat using a zebra crossing today, the woman in the car behind me saw it and laughed too.
Where is this book going to go? Back to the beginning, with illumination.
This is what a good man looks like:
When I was still into healing and chakras**, John had a hernia operation. He was quite poorly in the recovery and in severe pain. Later I looked up the emotions associated with that area according to my chakra book: anger, resentment and frustration. He said he ‘always holds it in’ and ‘is left with it’ (this is about difficult interactions with his children’s mother). A hernia is a hole in the wall of the intestines. So anger, resentment and frustration had literally burned a hole inside of him?! I thought, right, maybe the cure would be to let her have it, to say all the things he never says?
Much later, when I told him all that, and suggested letting her have it, he said: If that’s true, if that’s why I had the hernia and if that’s the cure, and if I had the choice between letting her have it both barrels, and having the hernia and this operation, well then I’d take the hernia, because I know how much my actions hurt her.
** I have shredded my healing logs, reflections, student journals and my certificates and registration card. Why? I realised I don’t know what it is I am doing; that people should probably heal themselves; that I should focus on myself; but above all, to make space for newness.
Rachel 