Fall In

The last several days have been a little rough.  The image above is a pretty good depiction of how I've felt.  She isn't sleeping...and neither was I.  I found myself in the grip of a spirit of helplessness, and felt like I couldn't move.  Couldn't even write.  And if I can't write, then there is definitely something not right in my kingdom.  As a child, when I was frightened, or just couldn't stand the world anymore, I'd sit with a blanket over my head to escape.  I suppose it was my attempt to make like an ostrich, and bury my head in the sand.  I felt maybe if I stayed under there long enough, the outside world would magically change somehow, and poof!, when I uncovered myself the world and my life in it would be a better place.  To be truthful, I still do that now and again...sit with a blanket over my head when I feel like my life has just gotten too much for me.

I wrote about how my relationship with God began, in the Wings section of this blog.  A couple of weeks ago I removed the Wings tab with the intention of writing something different in it, but I've decided it will stand, and I've now replaced the tab with nothing in it changed.  A little while into my relationship with God, I remember feeling a bit jipped.  I thought God would save me from all the shit in my life.  I thought to use Him as a blanket in which to cover my head.  I wanted escape.  However, I found out soon enough God is all about Truth, and facing the truth of our lives.  Yet as I also wrote in the Arrows tab, which I've also replaced, most times, facing truth will initially piss us off.  Like I said, I felt a bit jipped, and I let God know it!  He didn't really care, and worked His truth into me, my view, my perceptions, and my life anyway...

I wasn't going anywhere until I fell...into life.

As my relationship with God continued, I learned that much of my problem in living life was in actuality not living it.  I discovered an unconscious desire for escape was uppermost in my mind, and the very desire for it was causing most of the havoc.  I also came to the conscious realization that most of the answers I received from God were through my actual living experiences.  There were times while in an experience I felt the Spirit of God had deserted me, only to find out after the experience was over that He had answered me through it.  I can't tell you how many times this happened before I finally saw the light!

I watched one of my favorite movies yesterday called, City of Angels.  The story is about an angel of God, Seth, who falls in love with a human, Maggie.  From the beginning of the story he shows a fascination for human life.  The movie begins with a little girl who dies, and after she dies, while he guides her to heaven, he asks, "What did you like most?"  And she answers with the sweetest whisper, "Pajamas."  Soon after, we see him talking to another angel friend of his sharing the conversation he had with the girl.  She asked if she could be an angel, and he reluctantly had to tell her no, angels aren't human, and never have been.  The friend asked how she responded, to which he replied, "She said what good would wings be if you can't feel the wind on your face?"

Throughout the movie, and his relationship with a human woman, the message is clear that the difference between angels and humans is angels can't feel their life.  They don't experience touch, taste, tears, hugs, and all that jazz.  Then he meets Nathaniel Messenger, "a former celestial body, and recent addition to the human race."  He finds out that angels have one thing in common with humans, free will, and there is a way for him to join the human race if he desires.  He can fall.  His love for Maggie finally has him making the choice to do just that.  He falls into the human race, and in the act of falling he becomes human.  Falls into love.  He surrendered to Love, and fell into its embrace.  Love was the thing that led him to being human.

My spiritual journey has been very similar to the story of Seth, (far from saying I'm any angel!).  When I met God I couldn't feel my life, not realizing the desire to escape it in whatever form I could find was the cause.  More accurately, the desire to escape my feelings regarding it was the cause.  God desired to give me life more abundant, which is what I asked for.  Within the past 20 years of my relationship with Spirit, I learned the only way to have life more abundant is to fall into its embrace.  Anything within me that causes me to desire to withdraw from life, to separate from it, that causes me to not reach out and touch it, and those within it, has to go.  The truths I had to face were emotions like fear, guilt, judgment, pride, and facing all of them gave me a sense of falling.  I soon realized that the more I freed myself of these things within me, the more I actually felt my life, and that they were the very things within me giving me a sense of separation from it.  And the element that helped me do that more than anything else was Love itself.  When I chose to surrender to love, act from a loving place, reach out and touch, connect, these things fell away from me.

On more than one occasion I misunderstood, misinterpreted, and felt like I was being humiliated, the sense of being brought down low, when in fact I was being humbled.  Humility is a necessity for feeling life, for communing with Spirit, but the lesson of it will almost always give a sense of falling initially.  Yet I have found if I willingly sit in that sense of falling, then I am brought to a place of closer communion with Spirit, of reception, a more real experience of It and Life.  Anything in life I avoid, or try to avoid, will separate me from that real experience.  Avoidance keeps me suspended, skating on the surface of life, away from truth, away from love, separated. 

I recently wrote this to a friend, "Spirit is in the earth, in our bodies.  Body and soul are one thing, [which includes our mind and emotions] just as earth and sky.  I've found I've had to reach up to bring people back down, not down as in depressing, but down to earth...living in their bodies, not in their head, life.  That is where the greatest resistance is.  But that is where we get in touch with Spirit, feel its realness, is in and through the body, in and through the earth, then we can fly.  People have it upside down.  We learn to walk before we learn to fly." 

The past 20 years I've been in the act of falling slowly to earth, to becoming human, and joining the human race, which is precisely where God wants and needs us.  I wrote a poem not long ago called "Everything Human," which depicts what I am putting forth here.  It is something else I removed from this blog, along with some other poems, and now I'll put back within the poems tab, Truth Sleeping Under Wings.  The things I removed are very telling.  The act of my replacing them also speaks :).    

About a week ago I came face to face with one of my greatest fears.  A fear I've carried with me, and has lived inside me since I was a very young child.  I've faced enough fear to recognize it is just me carrying around a nightmare in my head, believing there are monsters under the bed.  All that is needed is for the light to be turned on, and love to step into the room of my mind to let me see none of it is real.  This particular fear kept me from truly experiencing, and giving love on a more full level, especially romantically.  It kept me separated from an area of life, and from a sense of connection I've desired to experience, to live.  In facing it, the light was finally turned on, and the truth was revealed.  I found myself, again, with that sense of falling...and what I fell into was a deeper sense of Love's warm embrace, the Lap of God.

I became more...human.  And now I can feel the wind on my face.

Below is a video of Seth, from City of Angels, in his courageous act of falling into everything human...




...And the following video is for my daughter, who I am in love with, and who taught me about falling into love, who just happens to have fallen in love with horses...where she feels the wind on her face.