In the dark of the night, I still wake with fears about things I cannot control. I still reach for reassurance that all will be well when we are living with the weight of ten tons of uncertainty about all we took for granted.
In the dark of the night, I peel through the layers of my personality, looking for ground.
Who do you think you are? a voice asks quietly.
Who are you under the glare of the street light where you’ve come to look for your lost youth like misplaced car keys, who are you when you grope in the dark for a hand to hold who are you apart from all the wares and trinkets you have set out to attract a life you think is worth living?
Who are you without money who are you fat or thin who are you if you weigh twenty pounds more than you do today or if you lost fifteen?
Who are you when the last molecules of your beloveds have been taken by the wind and stirred together with arctic snow and tropical wind and you are you standing on that bare rock with open palms up to the sky in gratitude and prayer, waiting for rain.
Who are you when your eyesight fails and the strength you counted on to open jars and lift weights is no longer on tap.
Who is it responding with a heart that still beats ba boom ba boom to see the sunrise and the flock of white birds that streak across the grey sky spilling joy, asking you to wake now to this beauty.
Who is it who weeps from the wonder of being alive one more day, of feeling the beloved’s breath, still, in the night when the demons threaten to climb through the open window.
Who are you when the train leaves the station carrying all the costumes, the glitter clothes, the high heels the fast ride the Instagram good life who are you naked on the platform looking for your next fix, the sugar high, the caffeine, pot, mushrooms sex drugs and rock and roll who are you when the curtain drops on all the seductions all the scenes of high passion and low drama that drained as much as it filled who are you when the return to sender package comes back and inside are all the lies you tried to ship to a foreign country, all the personas the smiles the hugs that cost you more than you had in your pocket so you went into debt bargaining with you youth, your vitality, because doesn’t that last forever? Doesn’t it? Who are you when the only light in the room is what you can generate from your own desire to see deep into the shadow that has eclipsed the sun of your soul, a light that awakens the seed lying dormant in the ground waiting waiting for water, for the right conditions to break through the dirt and dust and begin its slow inexorable movement towards the light, reaching for life, bursting with the eternal I am I am I am.
Who is the one who gropes in the night for the light switch in order to read the map that charts the route to happiness, who is it who dares to put down the map and sit in the silence, in the predawn dark and find your breath, the breath of the one true heart that beats for all of us. we are all breathing looking for the light switch to turn on the certainty that we have not made a mistake that despite our shadow our petty feelings and long held resentments we are loved beyond our understanding, that love is our nature, has always been our ground our home our homecoming and so we sit and breathe and know finally the answer to the question who do you think you are and we say despite what we have been programmed to believe, despite the demons and self-doubts, we breathe and say now I know and it’s so simple. I am love, we say. The light of pure awareness filling the darkness with love.
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Read more stories like this in my book The Ripening: Essays on Love, Loss, Marriage and Aging available from Amazon.
Nancy London 