Extremes, as viewed through two scenarios

Extremes, as viewed through two scenarios.

1. Imagine me, sitting around a fire circle (no fire, because of extreme fire danger due to drought so dry the plants crackle underfoot) in front of the yurt that I used to live in with Jeff, a yurt that has been turned into a shrine for a young climber who lived in it and died with another young climber from the yurt community, falling thousands of feet while roped together in the Tetons. Twenty people with me, all from a community of grieving souls who have been immersed in the aftermath of a number of recent deaths, some natural, others by suicide. A circle of Love wrapping us around on this full moon night as we spoke of grief and its gifts of tears and awareness and hearts opening to the whole world. Equal numbers of men and women willing to allow their vulnerability to show as they honored both their own inner processes and the beings who have preceded us into the spirit world. Could feel Jeff and these others around us, holding space for us, helping us diffuse the boundaries between worlds and open to interdimensionality and interconnectedness. An extraordinary evening.

Then, today, after a wonderful morning walking in the dry mountains with my friend Chris and a fresh salad lunch together, I open my iphone and find the battery dead. Dead! Dead battery in one week old $500 iphone! Immediate clenching tightness in my whole body, plus intense obsessive focus on how to fix this phone when I am nowhere near an Apple store and won't be for weeks. All awareness practices, of which I am so proud, OUT THE WINDOW as I worked for over an hour with Apple support to figure out where to send replacement phone, where to send my iphone once it's been fixed, and how to stop being bitchy to the man on the other end of the line. Given the nature of this trip, staying only a short while wherever I go, it's crucial that the phones arrive when they say they will arrive . . .

(So very fortunate that I backed up all contact and schedule info on paper before I left town.)

So yes, extremes.

Tonight, a potluck event with old friends and the book, and the catalytic action invoked by an evening devoted to the sharing of grief. In my mind's eye, a mountain of grief, now beginning to spout like a volcano, or boil, from the collective body. I see hundreds, thousands of circles of grief, gathering to remember who we really are as persons longing for love, as souls pouring out love. There is no end to what might be created when we allow ourselves to dive into our deepest fears, our deepest denial.