I must admit, extending love to depression and my fear of looking at it is challenging me in my depths. It is as if I am inhabiting depression or it is inhabiting me to allow me to write and love from that authentic place within that is truth. It is no accident (darn it!) that today I got to look at and extend love to this fear (in the “21 Fear Salute”) in depression:
What am I afraid of here? That I will discover that I have suffered from, ignored, covered over, been annoyed at and left as lost luggage this miasma of depression? I don’t feel this now but of course there was a very dark time when I felt life itself–and God, if I am being honest–was conspiring against me in a most unholy way.
I never wanted to “do myself in” or end my life in suicide but the next best thing a girl-who-could-only-inhabit- Good could come up with it running away from home. Which I did. A kind of soft suicide without the messy clean up. A declaration–needed mostly for my self–that I CANNOT GO ON LIKE THIS!!!!
After an intense period of time that included my mother’s emergency quadruple by-pass heart surgery; an explosion of business success; the accidental drowning of Jamling, the family bunny (complete with my father trying to administer mouth to mouth resuscitation); our eldest graduating from high school (& taking grad trip back to her birthplace in Australia with her high school beau); and last, but never least, my complete lack of ability to express truly express and have a full gamut of feelings I thought I SHOULDN’T EVEN HAVE I gave up. This is when a choir of angels wept and sung with relief at the dawning of my own awareness of my self, but of course I couldn’t yet hear it.
I was only able to express my need to flee to my ever practical husband. His startled face told me that I must
Love meets you where you are.
have looked pretty desperate. He said simply: “Could you at least stay in town? What about the Hyatt?”
This is what Love does. It meets you where you are. This may have been the kindest, sexiest, most loving thing my husband has ever said to me. I was so distraught, exhausted, numb, anxious, and stressed I could only think of fleeing. I believe he felt the more sinister undercurrent which I couldn’t even allow into my awareness. And he knew me. Two days at the Hyatt was a gift from heaven.
I can see the old Bible verse writ across the sky in gold in my memory: “I lay before you life and death; choose life.” I did. I chose life. What I didn’t yet realize was that Life had me already in its tender embrace and could not EVER let me go. God is another word for this miracle of Being. Love is another word for God.
The gratitude I am feeling now is as much for that deepest part of me as it is for the wretched circumstances I prescribed for my own awakening. So this is what extending love to depression looks like up close and personal; seeing the truth of my own despair, hurt and displacement.
HS: And see now what this has led to my Precious One, Our Voice shines true and clear within you. It needs but your willingness and welcome to be expressed for the joy and benefit of all my children.
Thank you Precious One, thank you.
Me: Oh my! Thank YOU Holy Spirit, thank you.
I relate and there is more for me, I am still in it! Because we are still going through so much over losing my great grandson. And my son’s health problems rapidly moving to the place he has to start dialysis over losing his only grand child, and having his daughter blamed even though she was at work and the baby was in the care of a sitter.I was taken back to a primal place with losing this baby, that I thought I was beyond. I was taken back to a place where i wanted an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and wanted to and still do sometimes to exact my own justice on the one who threw him away like a piece of garbage and blamed his mother. Everything! precious thing I had ever learned from my metaphysical teachings and class with you had gone out the window of my mind. And I have almost stopped speaking to the HS.
Dearest Mary, I am so very sorry for your loss of your great grandson. Your heart must be breaking. Holy Spirit needs for you to do nothing but whatever you are doing. Of course you grieve and anguish. When you are ready, ask to be aware of the tender presence of Love even now, in this terrible depth. I am holding your hand and praying with you.
thank you,