Waking up is much less like a light suddenly turning on than it is a gradual focusing. One of my first insights was into the folly of emotions. They are irrational and troublesome, like a small child, prone to overreaction and misbehavior. For this reason, I shut them off, locked them up and swallowed the key. I could still enjoy things, be happy, sad, angry, but never, ever again would I let myself indulge in the deeper emotions, down in the darkest crevices of the ocean, where the real danger is hidden. I may laugh, but never again would I cry.
Around this time, I also had the insight that it is our flaws that define who we are, that somehow, the secrets we keep, the parts of our psyche we are ashamed of, the poor and dirty illegitimate children of our personalities, are the gravitational center of ourselves. I rejected such an idea. It went counterintuitive to everything. How could these ugly things be who we are? The answer had always been with me. And like the folly of emotions, these were true things, but I lacked the focus to see them clearly.
The things we hide and neglect still live and grow. They are the seed and root of our personality. The more we ignore them, the more they become petulant children, like the boy who screamed in the grocery store one too many times, whose parents now leave him in the car while they shop. Like vampires they live and drain energy from us, trying to balance out their lack of expression, leaving us less and less, without fuel, adrift in the world.
These draining demons build and expand like coral, each generation building atop the other, a great barrier reef, a wall of pent up aggression and fear crystallized, imprisoning our souls like Merlin in the wood. The soul, like the sun, gives them the life we do not. We live on in the world, if you can call it a life, a half-life, but our true path is obscured, our celestial inner pilot blinded by the build-up. Our inner world becomes a junkyard, a garbage dump, a midden heap of the unexpressed and the unspoken, the unloved, the children under the stairs, the boy raised by wolves, our psychic ghetto. It is this gravity well, this black hole of an anchor that becomes the root of our being.
It became clear that this does not have to be. As the focus sharpened, the light increased and what I once saw was no longer. Ghettos can be rebuilt. The wolf boy could be taught to speak. The midden heap could be transformed into compost, fuel for the burning, shedding light deeper and deeper into the gloom, giving life to the pale white sickness that once bred in this place. The angel can be freed.
In this dank, dark basement I found a heart-shaped box sealed with pain and loss, reeking of neglect. Before I knew what I'd done, I threw it into the flames, smashed the crab-like carapace and I was free. The loves I had lost were free, washed anew in tears that were never shed, words that were never said. My mother leaving when I was three, my kittens dying when I was seven, my inability to protect my sisters, the repeated separations from my father, my first love's infidelities. Every loss, every abandonment, every time my heart had shattered I'd locked it away, sealing the fragments in the frozen salt of my eyes.
Now tears come unbidden when appropriate, empathy flows like Amazonian rivers. Laughter is hearty and deep like echoes in the trees. Love is free in the fields in ways the hippies could never dream. My heart beats despite the cracks and damage, and I will never again let the unspoken rule from a throne of my fear and ignorance. The Universe is always balancing the equations of the heart, ensuring the angel that is our soul is never so outnumbered by our demons that redemption is impossible. We need but to wake up and see the potential and raise our eyes to the sun.
