Think of a time when you wandered the shores wishing you could just see a lost love again. Longing for a glimpse, another touch, another taste. But things were not simple. Between you, obstructing the exchange of light, were veils of intellect, clouds of fear and judgment. Conditioning. Misunderstanding.
Perhaps you did see him, and perhaps you were able to talk, and instead of dissipating the clouds and rending the veils, they became thicker. Elaborate and sticky like cobweb.
Now I know why dreams and visions of spiders in cobweb have entered my consciousness so many times during the past year. The visions of cobweb always immediately precede an encounter with the complicated messes of mind stuff that blind two people to the simple joy of one another in the very moment they cross paths. Many nights ago, I opened my eyes and suddenly noticed the little spider crawling around in the little cobweb in the corner of my former love’s bedroom window, and the image of it, a veritable dream symbol of immediate significance, impressed itself upon me with such force that I couldn’t think or look away, and minutes later, he arrived home from his trip, a retreat on dream yoga, and cobwebs of mind rose up between us in a dizzying flash. Still half asleep, I soon found myself gone and crawling into the bed of another former love, the generous healer, who rolled over and put his arm around me and fell back asleep.
Thoughts and mental representations of the situation and concepts of relation, even the most straightforward of them all, prevent people from really seeing and knowing one another.
Love and truth are well hidden by misunderstanding and confusion, and we always think it is the other person who is all confused and spiraling out of control.
At the same time, I was wandering the beautiful streets of the city I left behind, finding stillness and pleasure in the picturesque lakes and beaches, with an irrational yearning to bump into another former love, that beautiful, sensitive dancer. Even if I saw him, I could not have spoken to him, but my body still felt a longing to experience him impinging upon my senses once again.
Longing and frustration. I opened to it and let it all in, happily. Sitting on the terrace watching sunset after sunset, I tasted and savored this phenomenon… wanting to meet eye to eye with those we love, see them, touch them, taste them, and know them without obstruction, and to be seen, and to be touched, and to be known without obstruction. And the frustration of obstruction is heavy and burning, an enormous knot in the stomach and a weight on the heart, but in this dream, this beautiful unending teaching, what does it mean to be separated by the cobwebs of mental activity? I know how to wake up to what is… but how do we wake up to each other?
Throughout my trip, I had the very distinct sense that I was asking the wrong question.
On my last day, I rendezvoused with my ex-husband and reunited with my two children. So much joy! On our long drive back to our new home, my seven year old son, a true mystic, told me that he had figured out how the mind and universe work. I giggled, but I’ve learned to listen to him. He said that our only task is to give love to the universe, and when we give love, “it’s like an exchange.” “You give it love, because that’s all it wants, and it makes your wishes come true, because that’s what you want. You can have anything you wish for, and when you reach 100 percent love, you get 100 percent of wishes come true, but it’s not like you’re tricking the universe or being mean or anything,” he added. “It’s like an exchange, because the universe just wants love, and that’s all you’re supposed to do.”
I nodded, and then I realized that I’d forgotten the wisdom of what he was telling me. I was looking at my lost loves and longing to reconnect, but the only task at hand was to give my love to the divine what is.
What was I longing for? For them to be awake to me? Of course, I was experiencing the very pain that the divine experiences for me!
My car sailed along the open highway in the soothing light of the setting sun after a passing rain. I spent so much time during my trip wishing other minds could be fully awake to me and see my heart directly, and this was God’s pain I was feeling, and it never occurred to me that instead of pining away at former loves, I could be giving myself to God.
“Dear Universe,” I prayed, “may you see me. May you touch me. May you taste me. May you be understood and known by me.” I felt a strange compassion for the divine reality, this everything, this ineffable presence.
“May you have me,” I said. “May all the cobwebs that separate us be cleared away. May I be awake to you.”
I wished for God to experience with me what I longed to experience with my former loves. Union. I never prayed like that before. Don’t we always pray to gain entrance into God, but we never wish upon God the joy of gaining entrance into ourselves?
I offered myself, every piece. On one of my last nights in my old town, I wandered the terrace and bumped into a good friend. We sat by the water and talked for a long time, into the night. He was a little nervous and stared at my legs. Before I rose to leave, I put my arms around him. Then I gave him a big, wet kiss, which he received with enthusiasm. I knew he wanted it. He smiled, and we said good bye.
Sometimes I feel like everyone wants a piece of me. A certain resistance rises up, a self protection. All well and good, but there is also, parallel to that body wisdom, a need to make oneself an offering. This is the spirit of the Tibetan practice of chod, and a theme in the movie Seven Pounds, which I highly recommend.
To the divine, I offered myself and let go of everything else. There is nothing else we need to do! Nothing at all! Figure things out? Forget it. It will never happen. The intellect is worthless in that regard. Learn how to navigate this dream? Foolishness! Why would you struggle so hard to learn how to navigate what you are in fact creating? How are you creating it? By your relationship with it, by how you present yourself to the divine.
Very soon, a tremendous, peaceful, inexpressible bliss swept in like the steam of fallen rain filling the dark green forests that extended from the road to the horizon. The way ahead of me was vibrantly clear, the sun now gleaming in the west, touching the trees.
Contemplate that terrible aching longing that you feel when you want to reconnect with someone but there is too much misunderstanding and confusion, and they are not really seeing you clearly. Then realize that the Divine Beloved longs for you in this same way, for your awakening to its true self. Offer yourself to the Divine, and let the dream take care of itself.
