It is -81.4F, we are passing 37,000 feet above the Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone, at 593 mph. And it is when She decided to wake me up on the plane. Right above that crack in the Earth deep of over 12,000 feet. Where life seems impossible under 100s of bars of pressure, and yet Life is thriving in this crack…
Despite all those extremes, here I am in this jet, with a very thin layer of the metal shell that protects me from certain and immediate death.
I am not afraid of flying. I truly enjoy it. I don’t think I am afraid of dying either. But who knows until we are faced with this old spirit, as old as life itself?
The things I am more afraid of are the ones that can break my heart in ways the most western modern science won't be able to see, measure, or put in a perfect mathematical equation with the same precision as this plane cockpit. Maybe our attempt at math & physics is to create an illusion of control over the inevitable, the unknown, the void, the great mystery.
Those things we cannot quantify, measure, control, and often touch, are the things that make us truly alive and human. We cannot measure nor control but we can still feel with infinite depth and length in wild territories in our giant heart. Those things that make us feel so alive, so fragile, so precious and so sacred: love and death.
Yes. Love and Death. And all their variations, their “in-between” and their opposites, right above and below the conscious middle world.
Above that immense and very ancient Earth crack, I am flying home, to my family home, to see my father who thanks to the valve of the heart of a cow (I am still pondering this…), has a heart that will now survive much longer the tender chaos of being alive. A heart part human, part animal, entirely sacred.
Our family's heart is shaken. Very much like this surgery happened in all our hearts in various depths and or various levels of consciousness. We are in this together, and this feels now even more real and true.
I wonder. Was I the only one to wake up at the precise moment his heart was diverted into a machine? Was I the only one to feel that pain in my right shoulder as he does? Is it possible to feel so deeply that there is only one body left to feel? I know we all can access this. My elders always talked about it, my altar has a prayer for it, so it must be right. I know it is.
Puzzling questions in this portal we have entered on how we perceive reality, see and feel each other. ARE WE really able to see each other when it is already so hard to truly see our own self? Is that illusion of separation a curse-filled with darkness only, or an invitation to return to our divine roots? A portal back into the Creator. Into creation.
In those difficult and yet necessary rites of passages, individual ones, family ones, or broader greater collective ones, it seems that God keeps breaking our hearts a little more and in every sense of the term, so we can get closer to our true self and to each other. So, we can see each other more clearly. So, we can truly listen and hear each other. So we can meet Her, the Creator, the original One who created creation so She could create…
Is that what She is doing? Breaking our Hearts to prepare our return?
Maybe She is so in love with Her creation, Her children, that seeing them in pain she had to break their hearts a little bit more (again and again) so they could learn how to transform that pain into something so potent it would be able to heal all of humanity? Maybe the journey of return is more magical and rich than we will ever understand?
That kind of love when hearts are so broken that there is just an unavoidable surrender into something so vast, so infinite and so true, that it becomes the rock bottom (in all directions) of our wisdom. That kind of love. That kind of yoga. That kind of prayer.
It feels like a very very old song. That every mystic that ever existed has sung. That every baby had heard in the womb of their mother. That every tree, stone, whale, and river still sing and remember. A song we have so often forgotten and are so painfully trying to remember.
We search and are constantly called by that closeness to Her, to Love, in every act of life. Either as an angry response to the pain of separation or as a more skilled attempt to get close to the One.
We search It in every scripture and ancient text. But like with each other’s our blinding veils of Ego prevent us to see the hidden and yet only truth that is right there in every syllable.
We search It in the four corners of the globe, in every temple and sacred site ever built, because we cannot see or do not want to believe that it is right there in the eyes of every being I met on my doorstep.
We launch rockets and submarines in heights and depth we would have never dreamed to reach in the hope to understand a bit better our own mystery. While the inner descent into ourselves, of just one foot down from the mind to the heart, will often be a complex and wild lifetime journey.
And here I am trying to understand that mystery of life. A call that has taken me to the wildest and most magical places. A call that has never stopped since I could take my first steps and voice my first words.
And when this heart breaks a little wider, when I bend my head in humbleness a little more, when I drop my knees a little deeper into the ground, I can see you, I can hear you, I can feel you so close. So close.
At that moment I feel like the oldest sage and the youngest baby soul at the same time. At that moment I lose my mind and all my questions. At that moment I become nothing and everything or is it everything and nothing?
I am lost and I am found. In the same place.
Truly a ceremony this life is. Truly a drum this heart is. Truly a prayer this love is. Truly a mystery this is...
In Awe and surrender Angell Deer
Art: Broken Heart by Gina Easley
