Listen to the Audio:
There is a truth now, for me, in the myth of the hero’s journey. That of leaving home and entering the belly of the dragon to bring back something precious. I have never thought I was on the hero's journey. The truth is that when I left home, I did not believe I was on a journey. I believed I was gone. In every iteration of this gone-ness for the past 21 years, I have been trying to build something in a foreign place, I have been calling to the sky for direction, I have been tilling new earth, I have been far from home with the full intention of finding a new one.
To halt the metaphor, this has looked like moving in with partners, looking for houses to buy, beginning new careers, integrating myself and learning a language: I have always believed I am working towards my permanence somewhere else.
But in every place, at a certain point, my bid for permeance was thwarted. My spirit would start to recoil as if the powers that be had pressed the button on the vacuum cord. I would have no other plan at the moment of recoiling. The recoil was always a shock. It wasn’t a logical step taken from a self-help book, about noting the pros and cons and making a decision. I had been trying with all my might, resources, energy, to make something work. I was doing the famous 10, 000 hours. But at a certain point, after thousands of little grazes, the wound would open to the point of no return and I would feel unable to go on. I was depleted, and weak from trying at the life I was building. I would be spat back into a depth of myself which wouldn’t allow me to believe this was home. This has happened numerous times.
(I don’t have children. I think this makes going and being gone, different. A parent lives the foreign land through their child's eyes, and through this sight, a part of them becomes that earth. The new terrain enters as darkness or light, but it comes inside. The parent takes a place at the table in a cycle of life greater than herself.)
But my experience is that the places I have been have been teaching me, with the insistence of a pneumatic drill, why I have been unable to find ‘home’. The answer comes down to a form of hiding, a spirit deception, a distrust and also, more mystically, to the movement of light when we cannot accept it. Light burns when we cannot accept it. When I feel my worst, I cannot be in the sun. Other times, in other moments, I prefer the light of the moon, I am not sad, but I must see the silky light on a puddle to find my place.
I get sick if I do not honour my light. This is simply letting it pass through, which is also captured by the phrase ‘giving it away’. It sounds so easy. But often I don’t UNDERSTAND my light. It seems to have no purpose in the world because this madness of modernity has hollowed out the human body into a mechanical unit in a world driven by scarcity and planning. So I stuff the light down because it has no purpose. I hide it. But it is stronger than my weak little plots. It will shoot out in addiction, sexuality, and self-gratification. The light is VERY powerful. Just think now of how light has been honoured on this planet. The stones, the civilisations. And how misdirection causes such damage. Look at the origins of the Swastika.
Now, if I try to be the light that others want me to be I am manipulating it and it still burns. We must be the light that we are. All sages, all saints say ‘know thyself’. This, for me, is knowing my light.
The light within (for Christians, the Christ Within, for Buddhists, our Buddha Nature, for Hindus, all the avenues to Brahman, for mountaineers, the gift of focus in nature, for many of us, the exchange of love in recovery groups, book clubs, parenting groups) is so bright, it is so totalling, that we think it is a property of something else that is washing over us for a moment. We get distracted by the form of the thing through which we experience our light (the person or object we love, the experience we had, the moment we lived) and we forget we are simply at a door. This thing, this person, this experience, these words, this group is a DOOR into your light which is both within them and within you. Do not mistake the door for your light. (This is the meaning of the famous phrase ‘do not mistake the finger that points at the moon for the moon').
I experienced the full power of my light in a plant medicine ceremony. The journey that night, to the light, was one of complete sickness. I had to go through all my self-deception. I was shown my life, my contorted being. I saw the shadows and it was a long, long night of horror. What do I mean? Horror? I mean my body sweated in fear, in the shame, in the strange lies, I vomited, I shook. I felt so sick I could barely lift my head. All the while I felt light pouring into my body, entering my skin, and it hurt. I had to surrender to this process to… get through it. It felt like death.
The power of the light coming in again is not something I can explain. I was getting rid of a material weight and some sort of fossilised fear. The ceremony, the ritual and the singing, our white clothes, the strange shivers that came over and over again before I had even touched the plant medicine, were the qualities of sacredness. I am very, very grateful to that door.
I know now how strongly a deception had held me. How strongly, without my awareness it holds me now. How I get a plain canvas every time I move country, to build a new castle of lies. I don’t mean I lie to the world. I mean I lie to myself and then I don’t even know I am lying to you. I say that I am this, that I am that, that I have arrived. It is all the strange and heavy refractions of my conditioning. I must accept what I am: an aging body, an alcoholic, a compulsive eater, an excitement scavenger. Left in the dark I will stick my nose in the drain of every alleyway to see if there is something in it for me. And I must know that I am light at the same time. And so I have choices. This is the thing. We have choices. We have to accept the whole damn thing, and there is no way out. No place where you can build without being human, no place to build without being swathed in light.
I am now on a return journey. I am trying to accept my light every day. What it is, how to let the compassion, the creativity, the love out of my body without trying to make it serve me. I must learn to just to BE the light. In the last 5 months, I have become my own casualty. I have burnt myself to a cinder. Really. I felt so low recently I wanted to disappear. But, I was sent guides. I was sent many guides, strange guides, some of them men, which is the point of my greatest wound. As a The Gone Girl, I didn’t know how to love men, to feel safe with men, to know they could witness me. But that is because I wasn’t a safe space for them either. I was out for my fix. I was treating them as the object, which was a super weird revelation. But this is the wound. As I get brighter, lighter, and truer, the men that come around me are bright, light and true.
So the guides came, and I listened. Today I offer this, back at myself and to anyone who wants it:
We must accept our light, we must allow ourselves to shine without spectators and to offer our gifts to the world every day without wondering if it can be accepted, without hoping for reward, without a motive. We must take our seats at the table, as a human, with all our darkness, and so be grateful to be with those we are with. We must eat up our plates and raise our eyes in wonder at the beings that were placed around us. We must learn from them. We must be reverent and loving, and I guess, crack a joke.
Here, from this point, I have booked a ticket home. Back to Birmingham. My job now is to keep hold of these teachings, to know that it will become ever harder, because the world is hard now, but with this knowledge and in community, I know that we, who come together at the table and can lift our eyes without wanting anything from each other, except their presence and the possibility of healing, we are the heroes as we learn to accept our light.