The Quiet

​The house where I sit is built into a mountain. To my left, a sheet of raw stone runs from floor to ceiling through both levels. It was once an ancient lake bed, millions of years ago; fossils of shells are visible in the old frozen mud. I am in a womb of rock and dirt, but this place is light and airy; the house crouches in whispering casuarinas that give song to the wind. It’s a tree house made of earth, with clever windows that open to let the breezes through, and dances with light, so much light.

I perch above an enormous lake, the deepest in South America. It reminds me of my home in Jervis Bay, which I always called a giant belly button, even when I was a kid. Lake Atitlan feels the same, like it’s the centre of everything. The place where the child talks to the mother. Maybe there’s a huge plug at the bottom, and if I pulled it out, the water would all swirl straight down the hole.
Rearing up in all directions, around the water, a ring of volcanoes claws at the sky. Steam funnels from different vents each morning, or maybe the locals just burn off to plant corn. I prefer the vents. I swear Smaug is sleeping in there. Does he guard a hobbit treasure, a coat of mithril to protect me from all wounds? If I were still ten I would pack for an expedition to go find the dragon. I’m actually tempted. Imagine if he was there, all coiled up with jewelled scales and a golden hoard. And then every myth alights in my fantasy; of course, if there is a dragon, I must ride it. Danaerys I am not, but fuck I would love to tame one.

Earth, air, fire, water… where is the ether?

Ah, that one, the ineffable, the un-nameable. The moment I arrived here I felt it. A golden tranquility, the delicate dance of space. There is a roaring stillness to this place. An instant calm in my heart.

I have been here for almost two weeks. I came here to finally rest and write. Nomadic life has proved delightful in so many ways, but challenging in others. Two surging businesses like baby birds with their yellow maws always open, demanding time, energy, emails, promotions, logistics, human relationships, attention, love, support. It takes a lot of work to be this free. When I am in Australia, my down time isn’t down, it’s spent feeding these hungry creations. I have no living child but the community that has formed through the Rewild camps is a creature, and creatures have needs. I must mother it, constantly. I must tend to a newer community, of divine dancers.

So I came here, to rest. And in the bosom of the Lake, I have rested.

In the space of that ether, in the roaring stillness and joyful days in the thrall of the Muse, there is finally room for old feelings to rise. Feelings I do not have time for, in the hectic tension of constant restless movement that is my gypsy life.

Last night I followed a peal of loneliness, here in this place of blessed solitude, in and down and through, until I landed in a new place. It feels important to write of it, before I paste over the memory because it is too big.

For thirty years, more, I have tracked human emotion through the wilds of my own psyche, in the company of countless people with whom I have journeyed as healer and healee, stepping stone after stepping stone. Sniffing, mapping, testing. In all the years I have never found this place before.

Most loneliness tracks back to feelings of abandonment, which makes sense. A baby cries in a timeless void, no clock to tell that mum will pick her up in five minutes. Each of those minutes is an eternity. Forever. With abandonment comes terror, because if a baby is abandoned, it will die. That terror hardwired into our DNA, so we cry, until someone comes, and we layer memories onto those first feelings of abandonment and annihilation.

Last night, though, I landed on a planet stark and lifeless, and the baby’s cry was not of abandonment, because there was nobody to abandon her. She had just arrived in this place. She was the only living thing in the whole universe. And from the planet itself, there was another plaintive cry. ‘Who made me?’

It came to me, all at once.

This is the terror I see in so many people when we work on deep old wounds… the fear and rejection of coming into existence at all. And if I track outwards and inwards, I see that this is the terror of first separation. The first breath of any living thing in any form, once it can say ‘I’. If there is an ‘I’, then I am other. I am separate. I am apart, rather than a part.

This is the first breath of a newborn, suddenly out of the womb. This is the first breath of a soul, split off from the oneness, wherever it is that we come from. This existential loneliness is the feeling of being kicked out of home.

For me, the metaphor was a crying baby on a lifeless planet. My usual movement is to heal the feeling, and as I feel the loneliness fully I would expect the planet to grow vines and shoots and flowers, birds to flutter an dragonflies to zoom, colour and life and oxygen.

This time, though, the movement was to stay here. Stay in the separation. Stay in the realisation that universes could explode into nothing over eons and I would still be here, forever alone.

I see that the inability to stay here is the fear of death, and this place is the door. So I stayed. I leaned against the doorway between life and death and understanding seeped in; what it is to have a peaceful death. This is the place where the violence and blood finally drops away. This is the peace of the last breath.

Doors go two ways. On the way in to life and breath, there is loneliness that lasts a whole life, many lives, all of them. It is part of being in a body, any body. If I have a border, if I have a boundary, I am in some way separate. If I am truly in the oneness, it means I am home. So if I am here, on my journey, learning my lessons, this loneliness is my backdrop. It is always, in some way, present. It is also my goad, spurring me forward. The memory of this door. I came from somewhere. I have the memory of it in my cells. I will never be truly at peace until I am in unity again.

And so we make relationships, exploring the places where we are apart, looking for unity in the other, and in the process healing our wounds for unity in ourselves. In the 70’s there was a huge spiritual movement of finding oneness in solitary meditation, sitting in the cave in the mountain, communing with god, source, whatever you want to call it.

But I see that the spiritual path today is about meditating in relationship. Can I maintain my equanimity with this person who triggers the shit out of me? Can I love myself and another and all things when we are in the middle of a huge blowup over who left the lid off the toothpaste? Can I maintain integrity in a community? Can I find unity in sex, in the communion of two bodies merging to unleash a threading vortex of energy that blows open all the doors and windows in creation, so that for a moment we are one creature?

And beneath all of this, the wail of a lonely planet, starved of oxygen, with a baby crying with the devastation that it has split off from home.

No wonder we fuck up. No wonder we do harm to ourselves and others. Some deep deep part of us remembers what we can be, where we came from.

So I sit with this child, with this planet, with the yawning emptiness of the abyss and something happens. I grow calm, calmer, calmest. I lean fully against death’s door. There is no fear any more. If I were to call it anything, this is the closest approximation I can come with.

The Quiet.

In the peace, I feel the presence of death, without the fear that keeps us struggling to live at any cost. Life is so fucking precious. But here, at this door, the oneness is a simple breath away. Just one breath.

Don’t worry, this isn’t me suicidal, not at all. Just curious. I have been deathwalking for a long time now, and its converse, my lust for life, is enormous. I have things to do. My time is not now. I am utterly fascinated with every single step on the path from first breath to last, in all my lives in all the worlds. Since Blaise died I have seen things impossible to explain, and for all my mysticism I am a scientist at heart, I need to know how, and what, and why. I will be curious until that last exhalation, and probably pissed off as hell once I am on the other side that I can’t send a message back. Maybe I can do a Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore. Who’s got the pottery wheel?

So last night I waited on a cold world, and felt the sadness that underlies human existence. I felt it in every single thing in matter, every rock, every tree. I felt it in the dragon breath steaming from the nostrils of the volcano across the lake. I felt it in the vast stillness of the water that plunges deeper than thought. And I remembered again, the truth that came to me when Blaise first flew away.

Grief is the flip side of the coin of love. The size of our grief is the size of our love for that which we have lost. To come into creation we lose oneness, which is the biggest feeling in existence. Pure awareness. Home. Of course we are sad. And we fight for life on the red red road, with fang and claw and passion and fire, because we love it so damned much. Life for ourselves, life for our families, life for every miracle that swims or flies or dances.

It’s a seesaw. Love for life with grief at separation. Love for unity with grief at the loss of life.

So we walk a spiritual path, those of us who do, trying to find the place where it all comes together, in the body. Bringing more and more unity into our lives. More and more experiences of the ineffable. Every time we heal a wound, we dissolve some separation in ourselves, and we get closer. To the place where we can contain the uncontainable.

My curiosity takes me all the way to the door. I sit in the Quiet, leaning against the membrane between life and death and feel no compulsion to go through it. Blaise is on the other side. Unity, oneness, communion, on the other side. I am content to lean, and feel. I sit, and let the Quiet settle into my bones, my heart, and I feel the sadness, not as a wave, but as a gentle sigh. This is what it is to be human.

Stillness. Emptiness. Peace. I see these threads in the endless gaze of a newborn, still half in the other, in the void. Eternal. Silence. This is the feeling of the last breath, and I am grateful that I get to feel it. I feel a love so huge it reaches to the furthest edges of creation. I feel such compassion for us all, dancing our dance, finding our way home.

Inhale.
​
I walk back down the path, into the colours and scents and riot of feelings that come with being alive, in a body, this miracle of miracles. I breathe, and I breathe, and I breathe.