All My Life is a Ceremony
We’ve been conditioned to believe that some of the more defining moments in our lives require the dramatic crescendo that one would see in a movie or TV show.
The part when there is going to be a great reveal or breakthrough and the camera pans to observe all of the actors expressions before the moment is granted to the viewer. You can call it sitting on the edge of your seat.
When you greet this similar moment in real life, it offers no cushioning of Jeopardy-themed music.
You are expected, in a flash, to accept your fate.
I imagine death to be similar to this. No recording playing back your life story for reflection and reverence, it’s just absence of, and glory towards.
In my flashing moment, my brain met the fleeting moment, and without missing a beat, read them to me like a prepared eulogy:
“All my life, is a ceremony.” Spread across my closed eyelids like a banner.
Finally. Years warped into seconds, into simply strung together words whispered to me in secret from the ancestors I prayed to. My breath became air. I am reborn.
Almost two weeks prior, I am preparing my yoga students for the emergence from winter into the crisp and warm buddings of spring, and I spoke about a poem that lead me to an inference.
It alluded to the spontaneous moment that is birth itself, the process by which nature completes some destined course, and the rejoice that is heard in a scream.
How many times does human consciousness entertain the idea of being hidden? Brushed away into cobweb corners of the mind, often, masked in deceit.
You are not who you think you are. You are not where you think you are.
The idea that life perhaps, is meant to be a cozy cave of necessities and one shade; the illusion, that safety is more readily found in the nothingness.
The electrochemistry of the brain stored those synapses carefully, the memory stemming from the experience within our protected mother’s womb.
However, simple reactant to product theory can hypothesize the energy input required for fulfillment of the great human desire to become something, to exist for something, to have this exceptional, purposeful life, where nothing happens, until it moves, collides.
We churned this fate in the womb supported by the planets, the sun, the magnetic poles, and bending light. And we accepted it.
Yet somewhere along the way, we forgot our plans, until the timeline offered the next split.
They say much of life can be divided in these before’s and after’s, and each split or tear in the cosmic material, if paid close attention to, is the peek behind the veil that can now, never go unseen. Bless all hands, visible and invisible, that held my hand through the door into this, after.
It was the invisible hands I believe, this time that took over mine, and had me pull the card, “Remember Where you Are,” on what I presumed to be one of many days of my life that have been written in order for me to do just that, remember.
These words are something I imagine I whispered to myself as I entered into this life.
No matter what lays ahead, pull from the remembrance that I am here, I am a willing participant in this experiment, in this beautiful sometimes absolutely terrifying, ceremony.
In biochemistry, we talk a lot about pressure.
How does one thing transform into another? Pressure.
How do these two atoms find each other? Pressure.
How do we explain energy exchange? Pressure.
How would you describe the feeling in your chest, hovering over your heart right before your life course alters?
Pressure.
This concept is not abstract, because it was in fact, the first feeling you became aware of before your first breath.
Our mothers’ squeezing, pushing, and promising that it is time to emerge now, and our little undeveloped hands fighting back, every limb down to every cell completely unsure of why this is happening in our perfect little cocoons, every particle of resistance exhausted… until trust became more natural than fight, and surrender, the first lesson.
Through our physical birth, we remember what pressure can bring. The yins and yangs of this perfectly orchestrated flow chart allows for first breath to be the ignition of fresh energy, fresh prana, the opening torch lit for new beginnings.
Life, will provide these opportunities again, willingly. A chance for us to rechristen our existence, but only through the denial that weight, is meant to weigh down.
Because it all truly derives from this same mystery, our understanding that through properly positioned, exerted pressure that graphite may become diamond.
And these diamonds in their ochtahedron shapes configure intentionally, and we observe these fully saturated hydrogen-bonded molecular compounds in all their beauty, stability and strength.
And know that they too, compose all the stars.
But only if, the bonds break.
It is all in this divine order, for the collection of these formulated “fall aparts” to create
an entire universe.
But it all needed to happen, under pressure.
This can be remembered again and again with every brush of cool breeze that marries invisibility to cheek, allow this to remind you that you’re alive too.
I’ve realized that these defining days of my life, and my loved ones, were ones encapsulated by that type of perseverance that physicist told me about all those years ago…
And a type of consistently loosening veil that sought no drama on its reveal like that of a TV show, no tears of fear, but a deep inner knowing that we are the writers of this realm.
So I let the pressure break me. I adhered to entropy.
Two eyes closed, but three eyes opened.
And I fell down in surrender, and left this one of many ceremonies of my life, cracking up.
Angels can be strangers. Thank you forever.
