“Another person is like a geode lined with hidden glittering.” – Catherine Newman
I believe this to be true. I believe this with all my might. I’ve been privileged enough to have gazed at this glittering, in awe, inside another person.
What I’m contemplating, lately, is that if I believe this about others, I might have to believe that it is also be true of me. Right? The last few nights, lying in bed before I fall asleep, I have seen a twinkling behind my eyelids. I can’t describe it other than that – but I’m wondering if it’s the hidden glittering winking at me. On the rare occasions that I let myself lean into a wave of trust, I can imagine that there is a whole universe sparkling inside of me. An expansive space, a black sky speckled with constellations whose forms I don’t yet know how to read.
I have only seen passing glimpses of this world, and, frankly, only recently. Why has it taken me so long to see it? I suspect that it’s because to do so I need to squeeze my eyes closed, need to to firmly shut out all outside input, advice, and approval. I have to go dark, as I wrote about in January. While I’m drawn to this, like the reverse of a moth to a flame, it remains hard for me.
I wonder why all that is within me is pressing on the insides of my eyelids right now, trying to get my attention. I guess it makes sense: this has been a tumultuous time, limned with a lingering shadow of farewell that I still don’t quite understand. Perhaps all of that transition and letting go is making room for something burrowed within me that hasn’t had the space – or time, or courage, or what? – to come forth before. Perhaps all of this is just the fundamental not-knowing of midlife sinking in, the beginning, at last, of my accepting that my home is inside the questions and not the answers. Maybe I’m finally getting comfortable in my own skin, and my body is beginning to offer up deeply-buried messages.
I don’t know.
I do know that I’ve glimpsed a planetarium sky that I want to study, to watch, to learn by heart. I want to live there.
I’ve had eye lids like that for many years and it’s lovely to hear someone describe it—it confirms my rising hopes of a new zeitgeist of compassion, love and direct, non-intellectual experience that offers to connect us into our expanded and more authentic Self, holding onto our unique but transitory identities and at the same time discovering that we really are part of something much bigger, like individual cells of a body coalescing into a cat or a human being.
I remember my pediatrician trying to explain these sparkles away as something merely optical, but perhaps it is as if we’re collectively settling into our seats in a living situation, our eyes lids like the canopy of the night sky that allows us to see stars that are always there, merely eclipsed by the bright consciousness of the sun, the masculine/thinking/principle.
The feminine, lunar principle accompanies the sparkling realization of our infinite and eternal situation…? You tell me, I am but a man, and it is for the moms and the women to light the way on this journey back into the cave, the primal seed consciousness where we, and “nature” are not intellectually conceived as one, but simply ARE one—a place where all ideas meet in their common source and ultimate destiny, each sparkle a shard of a perfectly shattered, and individuallyt inconceivable totality—what some call God, some Tao, some “what it,” but which no word or signifier can possibly contain.
Perhaps we find ourselves consciously at the transom of awe and spirit—arriving at an eternal time in which we live and love, collectively redeemed of our misery, our alienation, our fear and destructive angst and rage—spilled into the only force within us that cannot be stopped, for it does not find itself limited by Newtonian “Laws,”: Light spontaneously emerging out of darkness, darkness eternally enveloping light: Love.