Last night, I was awake all night, while sleeping, enjoying another one of those full nights resting in clear, lucid, tranquil bliss.  I am just in awe.  Every moment in peaceful, grateful awe.  With every breath, energy seems to pour into my body.  All the way in.  Filling all the space through to the very core.  It’s been a long time since those spaces were open, I can tell.  A very long time.

Events have come and gone that should have ruffled my feathers, but instead of sending me into a tailspin, they were sources of sheer pleasure.

My alternator melted, and I got it replaced.  Standing at the front desk of the automechanic, I wondered how on earth I would pay for it.  Yet, I also wondered why I was not falling apart, not distressed, and in fact not feeling any displeasure at all.  Current of bliss?  Still there.  Huh.

The mechanic said it would cost me just over $400.  Then, I remembered that just two days ago, an administrator at my son’s elementary school set up a meeting with me to help me apply to receive $400 from a group in town I had never heard of called Pay It Forward: No Strings Attached.  And the last time my car broke down, just a few weeks ago, the girl who delivered a new battery to my house said she was just “paying it forward,” which evoked much contemplation (see Close or Remain Open: Loving Past the Expiration Date… where I had even inserted a video clip from the movie Pay It Forward).  The whole thing made me laugh.

I got a voice message from my ex-husband from the Netherlands in which he ranted about his inability to speak to his children more often.  He blamed his lack of contact on me, and said I was “disgusting.”  Normally, I would have dropped the phone and run around in circles with overwhelming anger and a sense of helplessness and ruminated about being blamed for something he was guilty of.  I just laughed.  And laughed and laughed.

My young boys have been bouncing off the walls, whining, screaming, walloping each other silly, and telling me they hate me, and I am a bad mommy, and they want daddy.  I just look them in the eye, smile, a soft glow overcoming my heart, and hold their hands.  A few nights ago, I came up with a new game… we take turns wearing my new mala from Nepal, a gift from Rinpoche, and telling each person in the circle what we love about them.  It is amazing to see the transformation in their demeanor, how calmly elated they become just to be told how much they are loved in this ritualistic way.  I’ve always tried to be present with them, but the difference now is that it requires no effort at all, and no matter what they do, it feels wonderfully good.

I feel a profound release from issues of the recent past, resentment and grief that would not seem to go away.  Which is strange, because I made an effort to get some kind of closure, and once again I was told to keep my distance.  But instead of feeling like a pariah, like someone who doesn’t deserve to be alive, I didn’t feel any pain at all.  Just sympathy and a far more healing, even pleasant remorse.  And now I feel closure anyway.  I don’t get it.  Neither do I feel the need to question it.  I was expecting a wave of anger after my whole ripped up book ordeal, but it never came.  In fact, what I sensed was distinctly not anger, a decidedly different sentiment or energy.  But anger would have been okay too.

Perhaps the strangest thing was that last night, I had a painful urinary tract infection, but the pain was almost entirely drowned out by the bliss in the rest of my body.  I still felt discomfort, but it didn’t grab me the way pain normally does.  I crawled into bed, said a prayer for healing, recited the medicine Buddha mantra, and drifted into blissful analgesia, and by morning, the pain was gone.

What has happened to me?  I want to say I experienced healing, but that does not begin to cover it.  It is just as if no healing was ever necessary, as if there never was anything to be healed.  Never was a wound.  Not that the past has been rewritten.  There really was no wound.  When I look back on even my darkest moments, I just feel pleasure, love, gratitude.  I do not know why.

The last few months feel like a demonstration on how to sink into the darkest depths of hell and push off from the bottom.  Could I have received my deepest desire, the thing I’ve prayed for over and over for years?  To be a secret healer?  More than that… the realization that I don’t need to suffer in order to heal.  That was a big one.  And anyway, we are all secret healers.  There is no one, and I mean no one, to whom we should not bow our heads in reverence.

I don’t have any thoughts about the future.  Last night, I dreamed that I was standing on a vast shoreline with my two boys, who were characteristically running amok.  On the horizon (representing the future perhaps) were dark storms raging and an enormous black moon with three small Earths circling it.  The storms blocked the sun.  No matter.  I moved horizontally up the endless shoreline (the eternal now), and soon we were all basking in sunlight.  I was a little confused, because the storms were still blocking the sun.  Eventually I realized where the light was coming from.  It was coming from me.

(Hmm, “Black Moon” is apparently a hip hop band.  Whadya know: Black Moon, I Got Cha Open)