I didn't expect to return to Rio so soon, and although I am overjoyed to be able to spend a few days in that beautiful city by the sea... most of my trip will be spent at the Casa de Dom Inacio, in the central part of Brazil.
This kind of fell into my lap a few weeks after agonizing and calling out earlier this winter for deep healing. At first, I did my own searching for it. I thought perhaps that healing would be in the Ayahuasca jungles of Peru. I contacted everyone I knew that could possibly lead me the direction of that. They all made their suggestions, but I knew ultimately wherever this healing took place would not be up to them, or even me for that matter. It would be entirely gifted from the very source that brought about the initial trials to begin with. In which I had been undergoing for so many years, it seemed. After giving up and just surrendering to come what may - I was invited to embark on a journey to Brazil by a woman who was a perfect stranger.
Somewhere along this winter, I broke. I had enough, I needed help... or at least some magnitude of mercy from the cooking.
I know I asked to be placed in the pressure cooker. Even my soul it seems is impatient. Wanting to learn the lessons faster, to return Home faster. But what I was signing up for at age ten, then eighteen... I was completely unprepared for.
The level of burning was so high, and it wasn't until coming here - back to my mother and her husband.. my kin on this path, that I realized how limited my threshold has been.
I try not to gauge it with the intellect because it's pointless that way. How meaningless it is to compare. You could say I am sensitive to the world's suffering. My level of feeling is deep, yet my capacity for suffering is almost intolerable. Am I blessed with the faithful eye of guidance, or am I not actually that sincere in my aching, the way true Sufis are for their Maker...? Because they can take the suffering with grace, while instead here I am kicking and screaming. So which is it?
These questions throw me deeper into despair, because naturally my mind already has an answer ready. As if an answer will ease the grief in my heart, but it does not. This isn't what I'm longing for, some answer.
I try not to ask these questions anymore.
I try to remain present in this cooking. And accept when my voice calls out for mercy, even if I am not yet at a boil. So what? It feels like it! I won't bite my tongue and push back tears, white knuckling it, as if that is going to ease my suffering.. or transform it. It further suppressed it all these years, this grief lodged in my chest needs catharsis.
Even now, how can I explain that when I weep, it has nothing to do with daily tribulations. These may be just stings that trigger the wound again to bleed, but the marrow of my suffering is something else entirely.
My heart is broken.
It was as if one day I awoke, and let in the ten thousand million spears of the world's suffering pierce me all at once. That I felt ever tear shed in this world of every child's loss. The gravity of it. The weight... the impact hit me to the end of each nerve.
I couldn't take it.
Not me and my own. Yes, I partake in self-pity sometimes.. but who am I? Do you know how blessed I am? But please, I cannot carry the weight of this world's suffering like this anymore. My arms are occupied trying to hold up an enormous stone that is killing me and making me virtually COMPLETELY unavailable to actually be of any help at all.
An accurate depiction would be, imagine me:
hunched over, sobbing in a corner for the suffering of the human condition.
Then along comes someone hobbling, half blind, asking me to assist them in reading directions to go somewhere. But I'm too busy sobbing my eyes out to be able to read the directions myself!
So I bawl out, "sorry old man, I'm blind with tears! I'm too busy crying because you're blind, that I too now have blinded myself!"
I am crushed beneath a boulder, and I asked for it!
A part of me feels without this weight though, what then will anchor me down? Because before this, the memory of a selfish girl remains. A stranger who wanted all the momentary gains of this amusement park.
Perhaps yes, I am being reborn. Because I do not anymore recognize that young girl, adolescent in her needs and wants. Ask her what she wanted and she responded, "give me beauty and art. I want to be adored. I want to be a success upon this world!"
Eyes shining. Man obsessed. Attention from the father she never had.
Ask me a few years later, after those illusions were shattered, my answer was that of a martyr's instead.
"To serve the world. To serve, to serve, to serve my Maker. I want nothing more than to serve."
Yet still, I suffer.
Perhaps I mistook the word save for something else. To save yes.
But not to serve.
Ask me now to put on an apron and go sweep some floors.
"why?" I ask, as if an answer would somehow make a difference.
Will it gladden someone's heart? Will I get some recognition for it? Am I at least to be paid?
Because you know, I have played the selfish martyr for quite a few years now and am emotionally bereft inside. I will sweep the floors and then hate myself a little more inside.
I know,
that one day... I will sweep floors as if I am painting art. With the same kind of fervor and passion that comes organically in which I use to create.
But after so much pretend,
who did I hurt, but myself in the end?
After tumbling around in a ruck of my own mess, my own web of nonsense... I feel as if I have crawled out and looked up, through the tangles of my own hair... to see two luminous eyes looking at me with laughter.
"You done?"
Yes. I'm done.