Note to self: Life is both.
It is gorgeous and grotesque.
It is immaculately intelligent and painfully nonsensical.
It is comforting and terrifying and awe-inspiring and confusing.
It is both.
And it is the in-between.
We are both.
We contain both.
We contain multitudes.
For those of you that have read Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and know what a subtle knife is... my practice these days has been in sliding that subtle knife along the seam of the binary, slicing it open and entering into the space of simply being with the exquisite paradox of it All. Resisting the urge to cling to the more pleasant/comfortable/familiar parts, letting it all happen and making space for the entirety of life.
Every time I slip through that seam I feel like I’ve figured something really important out. A something that would lead to a more spacious and equanimous existence if I lived from that place. Ah, the trick of transcending the binary in every moment, that’s the work!
Grief is a sacred gift and a bleeding heart. Marriage is tension and release in perpetuum. Divorce is a set of wings and a set of knives. Pregnancy is a miracle, motherhood a divinely rewarding task, and both a brutal, maddening path at times.
The High Priestess sits in front of two pillars with an open secret in her lap. She knows that all wisdom comes from sitting between the two opposites, from holding them both and allowing something different, something that isn’t either, to emerge. She knows that the nature of life is contained within the continuum betwixt and that we are designed as alchemical vessels to hold it all and transform it within.
The binary is a distraction from waking up to the elegant complexity of life.
As Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us -
Let it all happen to you.
Beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final...
Just remember to let it move you and change you on the way through.