the healer

The entire universe of my pain is here in this bed.  And today, just now, I do not want to leave it.  I have a big demanding list of things I need to do outside of this bed and this pain.  But in this moment, I do not want to run away.  I want it to speak to me in storms and floods and screams and seizures.      A long time ago, before I can even remember, there was pain.  I absorbed it like a little sponge in a poisoned ocean.   Little.  Tiny.  Microscopic sponge in relation to the whole sea, I am.
                My body is the repository of these sufferings....for my family, for my community of friends, for my lovers, for my self.
   This is the bad news.  And the good news.

So this is my commitment, not as one I decide to make, but one which I know is made inevitably from truth.  For all of the things and beings that I love and have loved and keep inside my heart.....it's like this:
      The way out there truth is that the attraction to nature and animals, the love affair with dogs, the years of adoration of horses, the depth of love and admiration for the wild people of the earth, the connection with the plants, the devotion to the honeybees,  the magnetic appeal to the mystical....it is all me falling in love with myself.  It is me meeting myself, it is this which I find so lovable and so amazing in the world.
  And then the love and attraction and devotion to this compels me to go deeper.  And it it there that I find the face of the commitment to my calling.  It is not for an accident that I carry and have become aware that I carry this particular pain.   I know that it is meant for healing.
   The most stark way this shows up in my life is in relationship, probably like for most people.

           In the dark depths of my heart of hearts, where I could not even be so brave as to ask for such things, I have requested a relationship in which I could find healing.  The beauty I have been actively seeking on the one hand, and the pain which I have been actively running from on the other hand (which all, of course, exist in me) has manifested itself in another being who found himself attracted to something in me and put himself in my path.  I agreed with him that I had been seeking for exactly what I recognized in him.  And we embarked upon an incredible journey together about a year ago.
     Here, in this, is the EMBODIMENT of all that I have desired and also, by necessity of duality, that which I have avoided.
    Years ago I drummed up a similar manifestation.  The resulting opening in myself and the closing of other things led me to develop a list of compromises and controls which I would use to protect me from my truth.  They worked as they were meant to, but the Wild Truth inside my heart could never be silenced for ever or for long.  The benevolent and ruthless universe offers me again the opportunity to heal.  
   I am very messily and with much blood, surgically removing those controls and compromises.  I am letting go of the perhaps endless queue of pollution I carry from my own story, from my family's story, from my nation's story, from my culture's story.   As I endure with the guidance of my allies in the physical and non-physical realm, I can feel that it is the healer we are healing.