The Egg That Hatched Into A Billion Stars

​At Burning Man I saw Blaise again. Really saw her, but in the realm of shamanic magic rather than science. In a couple of weeks it will be five years since she flew away. Five years and yesterday and an eternity.

I meet her on the night the Man burns, when a whole city comes together to set fire to its prayers and shake the earth with its passion. I see her in the unseen spaces, in the same form she revealed when she left her body five years ago; a vast rippling being made of interconnecting planes of fire and ice and raw power fit to blind.

There is so much light. She hangs in space in front of me, not that she is a she any more. It looks like someone has pinched the fabric of the universe and folded it into impossible fractal shapes of dazzling focus, and it undulates like a collapsing nova, shifting between dimensions and realities of light in motion. Radiance. Radiant. Blessed.

Two gifted friends hold the space for her to come, and for me to let her go and free her. I can’t do it all the way though; I hide pieces of her deep inside despite the invitation to free myself completely. I don’t know if I will be ready to let all of her go until I leave this body and am no longer human.

She hangs in front of me, inside me, turning and turning, light upon light, and I tell her that I miss her. I tell her I love her more than all the stars.

‘But I am the stars,’ she says.
‘I know love.’
‘Remember I am the stars,’ she says again.
I laugh and cry at the same time.
’I remember.’

The light in front of me is mesmerising. The logical part of my mind tries to make explanations but can’t. She’s just here. I can feel her in my heart, in my cells, in the place where I held her close and sniffed the good scent at the nape of her neck with her back snuggled into my belly and her head resting on the soft inside of of my arm. I feel her where we danced barefoot down the street past all the shops that played music, her face alight, her starfish hands clapping ‘more, mama, more.’ I feel her where I cuddled her until her breathing deepened and she finally slept after the umpteenth bloody story, and I couldn’t, wouldn’t move until she started twitching, although my neck cricked and my back hurt. I feel her where I covered her body with my own on sweltering summer nights with the sheets thrown back, so the mosquitoes would bite me and not her, each tiny sting meant another one was full and would rest on the ceiling all night. I feel her in the place that felt frustrated when she froze, entranced by that bee with his fat yellow pyjamas, legs heavy with pollen, I had somewhere to be and there isn’t time, chicken, we have to go now. I feel her in all the places where I love her, which is all of me, my precious cub, I love her to the edge of forever.

‘I have to let you go, love,’ I say, weeping. ‘That’s the point.’
‘But I am always with you.’
‘I know. That’s the point.’

She is insistent. She says it again before she leaves.
‘Remember I am the stars.’
‘I know love. I’ll remember.’

I saw a clip a while back on YouTube, of a crowd gathered for a Green Day concert in London. Maybe you’ve seen it too. If you haven’t, the link is at the bottom of this post.

The viewpoint is from the back of the stage, looking out at the crowd. The drum kit is foreground. Roadies do roadie things. A cymbal moves in the breeze. There are sixty five thousand people, all pressed together, shoulder to shoulder, waiting. Breathing, sweating, chatting and laughing, joined by anticipation and proximity and the febrile promise of being part of something bigger than the sum of its parts. Massive banks of speakers play music to weave a common thread, keep people entertained; classic crowd control because a bored crowd is a dangerous crowd.

And then.

A familiar piano riff floats over the park and something extraordinary happens as people realise which song is playing.

Bohemian Rhapsody.

Suddenly, spontaneously, like a flock of starlings exploding into the sky, like thousands of dolphins weaving in and out of each other’s wakes at breathtaking speed but never colliding, like the startling revelation of a meteor shower in a cold night sky at 3am, sixty five thousand people raise their voices together and sing every single word of this epic modern opera. Every. Single. Word.

Together.

It is chilling. Staggering. The tiny hairs on my arms and the back of my neck prickle and rear like I am some primal creature in the presence of something that can eat me and I will let it. I want to bow in homage, and shudder with wonder and awe. I have tears streaming down my cheeks within seconds, sobbing uncontrollably as I feel that bone-deep yearning for oneness being met, here it is, here is the human animal in complete harmony.

Sixty five thousand throats open, sixty five thousand hearts meld and it is so fucking magnificent it sweeps me away, and I feel it, that incredible sensation of oneness, I feel and know what is is to be connected to every living thing, with no boundary, where there is no me or you, no ‘I’, just the pure consciousness that happens to be arranged through and around the general vicinity of my body; and is the same awareness in the tree I lean on, rough skinned and old; and in the zooming dragonfly lit up like a blue dart that just touched down in my hair before vanishing into the sky like it was never there; in the hanging mystery of mist suspended like ancient perfume on the delicate wrist of the morning, in atoms vibrating like fun park rides with all the lights on.

What if creation is made up of gazillions of tiny little bits of awareness, neurons and synapses in the mind of god. If you look with enough magnification, none of us exist; we are made of space. What if space is awake, and it’s what we really are, under our pretty skins. Space. What if we are the nothing that is the everything.

The experience of meeting my daughter in the desert, and her exhortation not to forget that she is the stars, has set off ricochet after ricochet of realisation, and not from the place of logic. Explaining this is hard. I have to not-think, un-think even, because thinking is logical, and this is a soul koan. It’s about all the lessons on the way to something incomprehensible. It’s the journey of an egg that will hatch into a billion stars.

I see that every single one of my lessons is about oneness. Unity.

Despite our brittle smiles and chitter chatter, I think most of us feel in some way lost. Alone. Misunderstood. Like we don’t belong, in the world or in our bodies or in our lives. We believe this dream that we are substantial, have mass, and are therefore separate; there is a me and a you because I can touch the me and the you and they feel different, therefore you are other. We dream that the mass is all of what we are, we believe the evidence of our physical senses, which are really just one frequency of information, in a radio with infinite bandwidth. We listen to that one station and think that we are apart because all the songs are of heartbreak.

And yet there is some deep knowing that I am and you are the same. This feeling of separateness hurts because it isn’t true, and lies are painful, just ask any child whose parents say ‘i’m fine’ when inside they howl into the night, and the kid can feel the truth beneath, can see the wolf shadow on the wall, and knows she is being lied to.

We identify with this body, knowing it is going to die, and this terrifies us, because we think it is all we are and that when it dies we will end, and life is so fucking precious we fight for it with fang and claw, we fight to give our lives meaning, to leave our scratch in the sand, some mark to say that we were ever here at all. All of this suffering and brilliance because we think that we are separate from each other and from the universe. We think. And think. And think.

Then there are those precious moments when we happen to be awake for that molten sunrise, or are captivated by the underlying pattern of light as it dances on water on a spring day, or a seal visits us while we paddle on a glassy ocean and it just hangs there with its fishy halitosis for breathless minutes and its dark liquid eye gazes into our soul like it’s trying to tell us something. Or the sound of a kid’s laugh splits us in two, or the music from that busker somehow makes time and our heart stop, or that wave we’ve been waiting for for months appears right in front of us and we catch it, hallelujah, soaring into the pellucid tunnel of stillness for what feels like weeks, knowing our balance is pure, we are centred all the way through, and invisible hands guide us along its shimmering face and back out into the sunlight and salt, lifted on a wave of eye-watering ecstasy.

These are the moments when everything lines up and for a minute, or an hour, or a day, we feel instead of think; feel connection, feel oneness, feel unity; not as a concept, but as something innately true in ourselves, something more real than real. The place where we are loved and wanted and enough. The place where we don’t have to try any more. Where we know that we are part of something infinitely bigger than us, and we don’t need to figure anything out because it’s all doing a bloody good job of being perfect exactly as it is, and maybe we are too.

‘Remember I am the stars.’

I see that all my experiences take me to places where I can identify my separation. Where I have an idea of myself as a thing, or a person, or a set of ideas, or a series of emotions that feel like me.

If I turn this around so that what I truly am is space, everything feels very very different.

I am not my body; I have a body.
I am not my emotions; I have emotions.
I am not my heart; I have a heart.
I am not my thoughts; I have thoughts.
I am not my mind; I have a mind.
I am not my soul; I have a soul.
I am not my spirit; I have a spirit.
I am not human; I have a human, and it is female, and her name is Gina.
I Am the spaces between.

If this is true then she is the stars and so am I and so are you and so are we, all tumbling and dancing together in a cosmic snow globe, shaken over and over by the winds of life and death in a movement designed to make us continually lose our balance so we can relax our death grip and see beyond the certainty of our thoughts, and catch a glimpse of other realities, even if just for a moment.

Can I let go into the river of this? Again, like the fragments of Blaise I hid behind my back so my shaman friend wouldn’t see them and ask me to let them go, I hang on to the parts of me that still think I am real, dissolving only so much, because I am not ready to fully die to myself just yet. But I feel the knowing of oneness as a truth, and my heart aches with melancholy and expands into peace and I let go just a little more each day.

She is the egg that hatched into a billion stars and so am I and so are you, and this is our dance, to keep turning up, over and over, saying yes to however much of it all as we can, and hopefully know that it is enough, and cut ourselves some slack. We are enough. I am enough.

I remember, love. I remember.

We are the stars.
​
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZnBNuqqz5g
(Bohemian Rhapsody link here. If you do watch this, for the love of all that's holy, use headphones, otherwise it's just a waste. Your phone aint gonna cut it. Just sayin)