Zero to the Bone

Coming Apart, Falling Together

Storytelling is at the heart of life...In finding our own story, we assemble all the parts of ourselves. Whatever kind of mess we have made of it, we can somehow see the totality of who we are and recognize how our blunderings are related. We can own what we did and value who we are, not because of the outcome but because of the soul story that propelled us.

Marion Woodman

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Friends, it must be said – after the year of the snake, I am different.

For weeks I have come here with an empty mouth. I am hungry to write, longing for the kinship of this page and space, but unable to find the entrance into the story. Where to begin eludes me. I must invent new words and maybe new ways, but I have not yet found my next shape. The moment I stop to gather up my thoughts, to provide form to what is stirring in my ocean, the language falls out of me. Slippery, teasing, refusing my grasp.

I’ve left the path and entered the spiral.

Because there is nowhere to be but now, I go sit with the river. There I pray and watch the slow lap of waves. The way water moves, moves me. The undeniable welcome. The absolute accommodation. Energy reverberating in all directions. No center, no stability, just harmony. How clearly water carries the memory of every splash, each fin flap, every body that enters it.

Inside this matrix exists the imprint, the remembrance, of all things.

The experience of ruthless dissolution has been with me all year; a faithful and unyielding companion. Turns out it is I who must yield to nature’s spin cycle.

Just enough squeeze to sand down some sharp corners.
Just enough agitation to disturb my sediments.

But as a result, a major core tension within started to come undone.

So much that that I hit the pause button here for a minute. I couldn’t wrap myself around a truth or a self that was still mid-digestion. To fully shed that old skin I needed to go into the belly of winter. Into the no-time. Offline. Where I could gestate and incubate and re-inflate. Where I could tend to the seeds that were freed in the erosion of outdated ideas and identities and defenses.

If I put language around it all too soon, I might get in the way of my own liquidation.

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A little over a month ago, I participated in my third Vipassana – a 10-day silent meditation retreat designed to help you see things as they really are.

There is a reason they call it a body of water.

Energy moves through our matrix, generating waves of sensation. Things swirl, split, come together, become muddied. Become other things entirely. The technique of Vipassana teaches you to scan for sensations, to notice what passes through you, and to release your definitions and ideas of what is happening.

Sooner or later, everything fades.

What you begin to notice is that how much you identify with the sensation and for how long determines the nature and extent of your suffering. One word the teacher Goenka uses to describe this experience is Saṅkhāra, a Pali word translated as ‘formations'. Consider the important difference between a line carved in water, in sand, and in stone.

Some of the formations we create take longer to wash away.

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There is a much longer story here that wants to be shared – one that has worn deep grooves in my psyche. The revelation of the snake year was having all my core wounding brought to the surface and pressure washed to death. A real Pull-Up-Your-Pants and keep going kind of passage. I got my spirit bones reset. I’m emerging a bit…soggy and wrinkled.

And with heavyweights Saturn and Neptune crossing the zodiacal Ground Zero for the first time in 6,000 years just a few weeks ago, the reverbrations of a total system reset continues to thunder through my bones and the bones of the world.

In the silence of Vipassana I received a tremendous gift: the seeding of what is next for me and the felt-sense of having left behind a too-tight skin. One day in the Dhamma hall I felt myself suddenly burst through a pocket, some invisible membrane that clouded my seeing. A the limited way of being that couldn’t perceive the totality of me until suddenly, I did.

Since then several divine waves have washed through my vessel and re-organized my fractals. I’m coming back soon, but this will be a short dispatch.

For now, I am still re-assembling myself in the last gasp of darkness.