Holy layers

Soaking in hot water and rosemary, my mermaid self disappears beneath the water and I am once again my aquatic self. It is the sixth day of a seven day fast.  As always it is though I am waking from sleep, aware of the cessation of time, lightness of Being.  Listening to the hush move through the canopy of trees, a cool invisible breath, all of my senses are heightened.
Here I am.  Stripped of all of my roles, anonymous and unclothed.  It is a strange freedom that is both terrifying to the marrow and as seductive as new love.  The canvas is stark and white and waiting.  I hesitate.  I listen.  The noise of my mind rushes in to fill the gap, to ease the silence.  But I am at home in not knowing, living with ambiguity has become a blessing. The doors are open and the dark beasts roam freely.  We dine in open air splendor without a care.  What was once hidden in the black of the abyss becomes seen in the light of day. How long I have waited for such a stripping of myself, of the holy layers of my human life?  This intimacy is succulent and ripe.  Surrender.  What will be left after the splay?  Oh so many deaths has this one life been.
The wheel is turning and I am still.  All of the attachments, identifications, and inflation are fed to the flames of the eternal pyre.  There is no knowing left, no fixed constellation of Self. I navigate by intuition, leaving behind all of the volumes of ‘ what to do now.’
My historical self as fictional as any notion of separation. The moment holds no then, or when, or even why.  This is the terror that the sleeping face and deny.  Swallowed by the embrace of mortality, of the fleeting truth of I.  Even the solid is on closer look a dance of space and molecules.
I wash the dishes and sweep the floor, make the beds, and wash the toilets.  Liberation has never been so sweet.  I am taken in and out like a long breath, like Sat Nam on a Sunday morning.  My current guru’s are new to the world and filled with wisdom and truth.  The two year old told me yesterday that my job was to “love them.”  She knows my work in the world, she knows why I came and why I stay.  To her, I am simply her Santima someone who mysteriously appears and disappears, just like we do.
This contentment fills my body until the last twelve months of my life disappears into the archives.  Without this faith that carries me across the water, I would have drowned before I ever spoke a thankful word.  My beloved how deep the well of my love, of my gratitude…


Santidevi
​Written: October 16, 2011