It’s beginning to sink in—that I can form a relationship—a WE—with something in me. I’d been sitting with certain troubling sensations and thoughts recently and had begun to understand this more deeply.
I woke up the other morning with an uncomfortably dry mouth and it came to me: I can sit-with this! I’d been wishing this dry throat situation away for years, and now saw that I’d been missing an opportunity to be-with-it.
What follows below is what I wrote while it was happening. Two short sentences came to me. I sat up and wrote them. And then kept writing.
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“I don’t look to you to disappear. I look to you to appear.”
I said/thought this to that place in me that is dry—thirsty to the point of having no more resources, completely dry and without what she desperately needs.
I wanted to sit with it.
And I did. I stayed with it. I knew it/she was here in her long silence, her having-given-up-long-long-ago.
And I sat with her and knew she had been disappearing for a long, long time.
And I said/thought to her, as I lay in bed half/asleep: I don’t want you to disappear. I want you to appear.
No exclamation marks were present in my tone. I whispered it to my mind: “I want you to appear. Please wake up from your parched-ness. Please wake up. I am here with you. I’ve been vaguely aware of you for a long time. Yes. You are under there—that last whiff of breath before you give up completely. Perhaps you keep imagining: “This will be my last breath, and then I will disappear and it will be over.”
Now it occurs to me to say: “No, it’s not over. This is simply your recurrent wish that it be over. You are wishing, you are fearing it. And yet, here you are!
You are here! You have appeared! And I’m here and I see you! I see you-giving-up and yet never-giving-up, instead caught up in this broken record.
Good morning! Welcome into my heart of Love. You have appeared and I see you and I am here with you.
We are here together now. You are not alone. Welcome!
–Elizabeth Morana
Thank you ,Elizabeth, for offering your thoughts and holding of these expressions and wishes and conflicts.
Dear Elizabeth
I could feel the dialogue happening between ‘you’ and ‘You’ and it was so palpable to me. The paradox that seemed to awaken an unfolding from the very thing you personally dislike the most, and it seems to want something else,“I don’t look to you to disappear. I look to you to appear.” And you listened this time and then you were rewarded immediately. The whole process came so alive that I could feel in my own body as it became aware of the energetic interactions. What a wonderful gift to be a witness too. Thank you Kevin
Wow, Kevin, there’s a whole lot for me to understand more deeply in what it means to listen to someone as I read what you’ve shared. When you say “…the whole process came so alive that I could feel in my own body as it became aware of the energetic interactions….”/ This helps me to recognize the times when I’ve heard something and felt an aliveness in me..
And also what you’ve written makes me wonder now, who said that: “I don’t look to you to disappear. I look to you to appear.” I wonder if there’s more for me to know about what happened that morning. Yes, I think there is.
Thank you both. There is such aliveness in this conversation and such reinforcement of the Value of being in heartfelt connection with some one else who is willing to be in touch with what is going on in that body wisdom. Thank you Elizabeth for being willing to be present to the dry mouth rather than wishing it to go away as in the past. Pausing and letting in something new, something other than habit takes conscious presence. Bravo!!