I did something wrong, and there is no way to make it right.  What do you do when you want to love someone and injure them instead?  In remorse, even after relationships have ended, there is a still choice between love and fear.

Two months ago, a man I deeply loved loaned me a book, When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodron.  I was struggling to cope with losses and difficulties that weighed heavily on me, and the book offered advice on opening to the pain and allowing it to transform the heart.  The book had been given to him as a gift by his dear friend, who I also loved.  She was a kind and nurturing woman with a passion for the arts, a playful spirit, and a big heart.  She wrote a note to him on the inner cover.  It was, evidently, a very special book.

Weeks later, they made it clear that neither of them were to be counted as friends and asked me to keep my distance.  I was, I think, too heavy.  I was so distraught, sensing the last of my bonds ebb, feeling myself slip into a world I could not carry alone, that I completely fell apart.  My legs lost all strength, and I crumpled to my kitchen floor.  I could no longer fathom making it through.  I wandered outside barefoot in the snow, pacing and hysterical like a three year old lost in the aisles of Walmart searching for mother.  I wandered through my house crying and screaming at the universe and hitting walls.  I saw the book on my coffee table, flung it against the wall, then ripped it into pieces.  No thoughts or ill intentions filled my mind, only utter panic and rebellion against loss.

I gave in and let the tidal wave crash over my head and sweep me away like limp, decaying kelp.  Thoughts having left me, I stopped struggling to survive and swam towards the ocean floor expecting I would never see the surface again.

If I hadn’t been so ashamed, I would have found it poetic, the book When Things Fall Apart in pieces on my living room floor.  Of all books.

When Relationships End

Yesterday, I went to the bookstore and purchased a replacement to send to my former lover.  Beside When Things Fall Apart, I found No Time To Lose, also by Pema Chodron, which discusses the way of the bodhisattva, a way to which I committed myself years ago.  Somewhere in its pages, it probably explains the right way to rectify a misdeed.

But what of irreparable damage?  What apology can turn injury into love?  I must do what I can, but when I do, people who mattered to me, and will always matter to me, will perceive only disregard from me.  My heart was breaking all over again.  The pain of being cut off reawoke in my body.

I was shaking terribly, very afraid to send the package.  I know that when he receives it, I will feel it.  Anger, disdain, apathy… they will all reach me and surround my heart like smoke.  After all, who would do such a thing?  Who would return kindness with violence?

I spent the day contemplating what it means for relationships to end.  They are gone, but I still feel a bond.  Their faces, I no longer see.  Their voices, I no longer hear.  Sometimes I wish I could perceive with my senses what I remember with my heart.

How do I reconcile their absence with the fact that I feel them in my heart?  Am I supposed to eject them from my heart so that what is on the inside of me matches what is on the outside?

“Universe, what do I do with this?” I pleaded.  “There is something I am just not getting.  Make me get it!”  Nothing in my life gives me more pain, more unbearable pain, than being ejected from the heart of someone who is in mine.  “Be careful when you break my heart,” I want to say, “because you are in there.”

There is only one thing to do, I thought.  Love through the pain.  Love through guilt and remorse that cannot be rectified.  Love through the anger that will come my way, fully deserved.  Time to be brave.

When Fear Falls Away

Something strange happened.  Before making my way to the bookstore, I attended a class for which I am a teaching assistant, and I listened to a professor relate her story of developing and surviving breast cancer.  “As you can see,” she said, “I’m alive and kicking!”

Hours later, searching for Pema Chodron, a book drew my eye and called to me: When Fear Falls Away: The Story of Sudden Awakening, by Jan Frazier.

The moment I read her first pages, my heart was leaping with excitement.  She describes a process of personal transformation that strongly parallels my own.  Although it began with a different set of circumstances, the fear was the same.  It began when she developed breast cancer.  That was the second time that day I heard such an account.

Jan describes a moment when all of her primal terror disappeared, and for no apparent reason, she begins a life of tranquility and bliss.  She writes:

It is like the floodgates have blown clean off their hinges, the rushing of the torrent in my ears sweetly deafening.

I am the water.

I woke throughout this most recent night… well, I say “woke,” but it wasn’t exactly that.  If I really was awake as often as I felt myself aware, I would be exhausted this morning.  I would not have arisen so effortlessly.  But I did come to some level of awareness as I slept.  Sometimes I actually woke up, and each time I was in intense bliss, and felt not a drop of grogginess, or disorientation.

I have felt that exactly.  I have felt it!  Many, many nights.  As though I were being cradled all night in the arms of a loving being.  Inexplicable.  Not earned or requested.  Just there.  I feel as though I am awake all night, even though I am sleeping, and there is a goofy, blissful smile on my face all night.  I had never read anyone else describe this experience.  I was ecstatic!

Jan went on to describe her encounter with Gurumayi, an enlightened woman who inspires devotion in satsang and kirtan communities.  Despite her Catholic background, she falls in love with Gurumayi.  Her joy and wakefulness continue:

The black of night, and I am in bed and come to sudden wakefulness in what I can give no other name than bliss.  Over and over again this happens, the waking to an awareness of ecstasy that has continued unbroken as I have slept.  It feels as if I have been aware continuously, even though I have been asleep.  It’s like I watch myself all night.

I was actually asleep most of the time but still aware, and not merely aware of myself in my bed but aware of being constantly on the verge of tears of joy.  And for no apparent reason.  That’s the part I can’t get over.  It’s like joy with no source.

At this point I am rolling around blubbering “yes, yes!”

Her stories made me realize that if love can cradle me all night, I can do it too!  I was so excited.  It must have been 2 a.m., maybe 3, when my tossing and turning was broken by this insight.  I imagined my loved one lying next to me.  This was not a romantic fantasy.  My imagery was only meant to sharpen my intention, to make it real.  I placed him in my arms, wrapping them around his imaginary form the way I cradle my son, and imagined love surrounding him.

And I held him there all night, in and out of sleep.  “I just love you,” I said.  “The whole universe loves you.  May God give it new form, your moirae.”  The blissfulness returned.  I enveloped him with it.  Nothing else mattered.

I also noticed, as love was gushing out of me, I started having visions again.  I saw a shooting star in the night sky, utterly vivid and real.  How did such imagery enter my mind?  It was so beautiful.  A host of other images, sounds, and ideas popped into my mind out of nowhere, as if I had opened a portal into the collective consciousness.  Many times during meditation, after seeing such images, I encounter them in “real life” hours or days later.  Some images seem quite arbitrary.  I once saw initials carved into a plank above a creek, and hours later, I went on a hike through a new park and encountered the same initials on the wooden rail of a bridge above a creek.  I was dumbfounded.  During a meditation retreat, I saw an image of an airplane in pieces, and at the same time, a plane was crashing into the Hudson river, poking out of the water in the same configuration.  Our minds really are linked.  God is waking up in us.

I had another of those blissful, awake nights.  Was it that simple?  All I needed to do was let myself keep loving?  Why did I believe I was not allowed to love people who no longer want me in their world?  Perhaps because I was afraid of transmitting my sadness along with it.  Whatever the case, I perceived that all is well.

Their faces, I no longer see.  Their voices, I no longer hear.  But we are not our faces, and we are not our voices.  When you expand beyond the island, your body, and become the ocean, even islands ripped apart epochs ago sitting on opposite ends of the world are united.  I’m not afraid anymore.

Relationships end but love does not.

I am off to the post office now.