A Moment in Time

Sometimes words cannot capture a moment in time.  Maybe words never can really capture the essence of experience.  And sometimes, staying with the words gives me an escape hatch from being inside the depths of emotion, connection, feeling.  Sometimes words take me to the depths.  But I've used them all my life as a shield or a blanket, and I can hide behind them when it serves the purpose of my ego who doesn't really want the real me to be seen.

Words cannot capture the moment in time that was my weekend.  The time melts away like the pictures so beautifully formed in the sand mandalas then ritually deconstructed and sent floating down the river.  But the images remain.  Pictures of community and love and grief and pain and transformation.  Deep places honored and held and touched and healed.

I want to wrap words around it to hold on to the experience.  But I won't, because I can't.  I can only marvel at the transformed place inside of me and carry the memory forward into the next step and the next and the next.

But I will remember hugs and flames, watery depths and laughter, terror and truth.  I will hear the music from John Denver and Janice Joplin and Joan Osborne and the beat of tribal drums echoing through my dreams.  I will gather my chi.  I will walk the labyrinth and wait.  My arms and legs will feel the heat of exertion and the cool immersion at the end of the journey.

I will feel arms around me, grounding me, as I look fear in the face.  I will draw on the energy wrapped around me in an ever widening spiral.  I will take my medicine and take the next step.  Because I know I don't walk alone.

And I will carry the transformation, like the river carries the sand from the mandala.  Ever shifting the path, meandering from bank to bank, and polishing the rocks under the surface into smooth shining treasures. 

And because I have been seen, I can now see.  Because love held space for my pain and my joy, I am better able to hold space in love for someone else.  In letting go of the fear, I found community.  And in the community I found courage.  And in the courage, I let go of the fear.  And I have been forever changed.