This Place...and then...That Other Place

My last blog entry on May 25th was entitled "This Place."....and then, I ran head first into "That Other Place."  That other place where if my beloved friends and family had not pulled me back from the edge of a very deep abyss, with the sheer strength of their heartstrings, I would have surely catapulted myself over the ledge.

Caution: do not attempt entering the forest of the 'dark night of the soul' without leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind you for your Tribe to come and find you, if you cannot find your way back alone.

I was in so deep that I could not have possibly found my way back home without their stalwart and gentle footfalls following very close and very quietly behind me.  I lost sight of them but they never lost sight of me....

I usually begin my forest treks with, at first, a lot of bravado and a backpack of courage but sooner or later the bravado crumbles and the courage flees.  Next thing I know, I am un-compassed, the flashlight goes dead and in the ink-black dark, of course, all the scariest of my inner demons have a hay-day with my body, mind and soul.  Hiding under my bed of tree branches, I try and remember to welcome the demons, serve them tea and cookies; befriend them.  But with the particularly scary one's, I would find myself hurling the cookies at them---breaking tea cups, left and right, while panicked  and scrambling as far away as I could from their draconian taunts.  The more I feared them, the more they would come back in legions.

I found myself shaking and quaking and weeping a lot. Legions love the scent of fear....

Now six weeks into the thickets and thorns of the forest, I began to feel something that only Legions could love...the feeling of losing my mind, forsaking my sense of basic goodness, forgetting the truth of who I am,leaving behind my trust in the kindness of strangers, family, friends and tribe.  I was in deep shit.

Yesterday, I faced my Dilemma: I had succumbed to all the Phantoms of Fear that were happy to devour me.  Oh, and then, the angels, divas, and muses seem to appear out of nowhere. Of course, they were always there but they would never come close until I started proclaiming my Truth out loud...even if no one else could hear me:  "I am love, I am loved, I will not believe the vitriol of self-deception that I need to be more than I am, that I don't need to hate myself to find myself, that I don't need to go it alone, that I can trust those who love me so dearly, that I am not separated from my spiritual core, that I need not be burned at the stake for 'the sins I did not commit.' "

The dawn of my just 'being' was at hand.  One of the Tribe members grabbed my own trembling hand and I looked around me to see all those who love me,  holding hands in a circle of sacred protection.  The protective sacred ring  was for me; was for them , as well.  The circle cannot be broken--my life was inextricably tied to theirs.  They too had experienced the 'forest', they too knew how dark it can get when we believe we can actually let go of the hands that bind us together...the hands that are really one in the same.

That Other Place will always be available to me; the dark forest will wait patiently for me to enter again and again...ah, but the Tribe, also waits patiently for my next quest into the forest.  The Tribe knows intimately the dangers and pitfalls of letting go of self-compassion and venturing out to where we think no one can find us....they are always there, always ready to remind me that I can never really be forever lost in that Other Place.


A Grateful Gracie Garp