threads of my life braiding love, loss & politics Adamante of the DeerStag

threads of my life braiding love, loss & politics by Adamante of the DeerStag

Everything dies.

Fear gone In light of our inevitable defeat One fights only because one loves.

*

This is when it struck me, how bad it had become. When the first major study came out describing the collapse of insect populations worldwide. I’m no ecologist, but something in my bones knew this was one of the worst news possible. Insects are one of the basic building-blocks of life as we know it.

In the summers before, I’d had this feeling that something was missing, a background noise to life itself. Again and again, when summer came, I kept being surprised by how little I was being bugged. Where was the buzzing? There was a wrong quietness in the air, like life was not being alive enough.

My body could feel it. The study just helped my mind catch up.

When I was a kid, in the eighties, walking on a summer day meant you would surely be crossing paths with a congregation of tiny little fruit flies, a dancing cloud playing with the wind, with the light. It was the simplest thing, but it had a magic to it. How it looked both chaotic and harmonious. How it reacted to your presence or not, depending on the speed and the type of your movement. And how glorious it was, in the summer evening light, a shimmering miracle made of the most humble creatures.

I had been missing them. Missing how commonplace their miracle used to be. I cried.

*

As a teenager and a young adult I fought a lot. I fought for queer rights. I fought for social justice. I fought for the environment. There was always an urgency to the fight. It had to be won, it had to be won now. Queer rights now. Justice now. Save the planet now. In every fight, I put all of myself. All my hopes and pains, all my fears for myself, for the future: all my unresolved issues.

So much of the anger at injustice was really my own wounding, mine to tend to and transform. So much of the fear for the earth was made out of the fear living in my body because of trauma. The way I spoke as a public speaker, what I said, how I said it: I was fighting for life outside because I was still fighting for mine inside.

I didn’t see the difference between the wounds of the world and mine. I needed healing: I went on to try and fix the world. This was a broken way.

*

I don’t judge myself for that. It was, in its own way, innocent and pure.

It was the best I could and the best I knew.

It was messy, yes, but life is messy and so am I.

*

Life suddenly took me in another direction, the first time I died.

When spiritual awakening found me, it stripped me from most of what I thought had been myself. It showed me how absolutely selfinvolved my life had been up to this point, how everything altruistic I had taken part in, how every high aspiration I’d had, how all of it had been but a mind game, played with myself, by myself and for my very own benefit.

I stopped all and any involvement in politics after my awakening. It just all melted away from me. I had to figure out what had happened to me, which was a full time occupation, especially when my Kundalini awakening began and steamrolled over my soul and body for a good eighteen months, until getting up to go to the bathroom became an accomplishment. I learned so much during that period. But I lost so much too. So much.

I lost most of my friends and social network. I was put outside of the loop. The very social and active person I used to be had become an ailing

I lost most of my friends and social network. I was put outside of the loop. The very social and active person I used to be had become an ailing mystic who couldn’t get out of bed and whose experience of the world was becoming disturbingly alien to everything their friends knew. We do mysticism in France: in books, where that’s proper and acceptable. Other than that? Don’t be a weirdo. Awakening turned me into a drop-out. No public forums, no protests, no board meetings, no election days after that. Instead, I was writing devotional poetry and studying Advaïta Vedanta, Tibetan Buddhism, Kashmir Shaivism, Sufism and Rhenan Theology.

*

After seven years or so, when I was finally getting to the point of finding a new balance, I realized I had a lot of trauma to work through. A lot. To use words from mytherapist: “people-withyour-background-generally-don’t-make-it” a lot.

Back to work. Back to challenging all of my world again.

*

Then my husband left me. (I promise, it all loops back to politics.)

I don’t blame him: I left myself quite a few times during the times he stuck around. There was no progress possible for the two of us as long as we were staying together. I’m too much of a ride-or-die kind of person: I would have stuck to it, against all reason, till whatever end we would have come to. He had to be the one to leave. That’s when I really met grief.

*

Grief is a strange thing. It’s an animal of sorts. It has needs, and its own way to move: gracious and somewhat uncanny. If you don’t give it enough space, it will just stay there, lowly grumbling, unmoving. And when you’re finally available, it will choose its own time, its own way to finally come forward, slowly or pouncing, to make itself known.

I was living on a ranch when it happened, in an intentional community of sorts by the Columbia Gorge. I was walking the grounds, an oak savannah with ponderosa pines, when grief finally rose up and brought me to my knees.

I literally fell to the ground And I began crying. I began crying for my relationship:

I ended up crying for everything, Absolutely everything.

*

With grief comes a tenderness and a wisdom. Grief is not something you contain: it takes you, it passes through you. I was struck by waves and waves of a visceral sense of loss and powerlessness. The waves felt so big, I felt so small: I could only fall to my knees, by a tree or a stone I liked, and let it all take me. Let the ground hold me.

And wail, and wail, and wail or let it wail through me: a strange banshee announcing the loss of the past. The loss of people that left when I could not grieve. The loss of things that should have happened but didn’t. The loss of beautiful things that happened then went away, leaving their absence behind.

The process itself brought around another loss. The loss of something youthful, that used to feel complete and whole. I was chipped and cracked now. I would never feel the radiant wholeness of the divine child anymore. Not the way I used to anyhow. I’m still grieving that one. At the same time, I could feel a daily tenderizing of my soul being accomplished. Something unyielding was stepping down into suppleness and surrender. Something of a boastful pride was being humbled. I was not the master in my own house. I had to trust the unknown of grieving and, daily, learnt how to surrender to the only help around me: nature.

Trees, bushes, rocks and lichens, the song of wind and the whiteness of snow, the smell of dust and bark and the embrace of the sky, the eternal blue sky that was the only thing vast enough to hold my pain.

I was a small thing, such a small thing. A small thing in a storm of pain, Held by infinite beauty.

Humbled inside, Humbled outside – Yet strangely blessed.

*

It was then that I cried for the fruit flies. I cried for the oceans.

I cried for the forests and all the beings displaced when we uproot them.

I cried for human beings everywhere, suffering and makers of suffering, All of us, lost beyond words. I even cried for soil, because soil too is dying and suffering.

I grieved it all.

All of life. All of everything. For in my bones I could feel it: whether we win the fight or not, everything we know will pass away.

That is the way of things.

*

Everything dies –

All that I love and cherish, people, trees, books, cities, coastlines, the sun itself: it’s all going to go away. It’s all already gone. There’s no winning that fight. Fear gone In light of our inevitable defeat Because I was given the visceral knowing that I can not save one thing from destruction, because I cried for everything, because I felt in my gut how powerless I was to save anything from Life itself, Life, the Great Giver and the Great Eater of things, because I know in my bones, in my skin, in my heart, in my pulsating sex that we are all done for, that this world is all done for anyway: I don’t fear for us anymore. One fights only because one loves. I don’t fight because I’m scared anymore. I don’t fight because I want to avoid the pain of loss anymore. I don’t fight to not feel the powerlessness and the wound. I don’t fight to save anything. I wouldn’t say I’m fighting, actually. I tend, I serve. I plant, I dig, I water...

I love.

*

Some part of me wants to believe this is what politics is really about. It just took me a while to figure out.