The Best of All Possible Birthdays
Trip Start
Oct 09, 2007
1
31
45
Trip End
Mar 10, 2008
Kolkata (Calcutta),
West Bengal,
India
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Wretching in bed, taking pill after useless pill with endlessly roiling thunder crashing around painfully in my abdomen, I was also having vivid, technicolor dreams. Of climbing a narrowing circular staircase and stopping at all these points along the way to see fundamentalist Christian revivals, 50 couples in the same outfit made up to look exactly like Steve Martin and Cybil Shepherd, doing the same, Broadway-esque dance routine in Hollwyood Squares type boxes. Of taking responsibility for carrying a very special little black baby girl, whom I then subsequently lost while trying to pick up laundry I had dropped. A deeply base, disembodied, booming male voice insistently repeating loudly, over and over to me: "You have a program to train your mind!" And finally sticking my head out of a tiny circular opening at the top of the inverted cone-like staircase into a clear and beautiful empty night sky, and concluding it had all been worth it.
The dreams literally went on day and night, night after night. Though I can't remember most of them they, all involved climbing, and the sense of a circular staircase ... quite remarkable over 4-5 days and nights. On another night, looking up at the stars, I kept noticing streaks of light from shooting stars crossing the sky, until 3 coming from different directions met together in a single, central point overhead and sent a dramatic shaft of light to earth.
In between wretching and dreaming, the trips to bathroom, calls to the doctor to ask questions or get new meds, all of which seemed to make me feel worse rather than better, I was praying, calling, and literally crying out to Baba Lokenath to fulfill his promises to save us from our misery when we call to him for help. I was begging to find peace of mind, to figure out how to overcome the tyranny of my mind and the misery it creates for me so much of the time, and to show me how to dwell in God (I had been wrestling with this since the evening Baba spoke about it, see blog #30).
Then on the last night, the flailing subsided (though my guts were still rumbling). My heart seemed to fill with all of the energy of the grace that Baba has ever brought into my life. And I realized, a little more fully, who Baba is in the life of my soul. He has been the Embodiment of Grace, the Bringer of Grace, God's very hand extended to me, with such infinite mercy and kindness and love.
All the grace I have experienced coming to me from Baba was washing around in my chest. The indescribable sea of grace that would flood over me 14 years ago whenever I opened his emails at 2 or 3 in the morning to edit his book. The blessings that I always experienced at work when he was effortlessly moving my life and the lives of my children forward to some new, undreamed of increment. The wonder of the grace that Stewart and I both felt at Baba having brought us back to each other, to be remarried just months before his cancer took over his body, and to share his final years, restored to the mystery and depth of our love for each other.
Gradually, this sweet, subtle, giving light, became more Visitation, more Presence, more Being than light.
Floating back and forth between prayer and thought, I realized, this is what it means to dwell in God. To dwell in the Eternal is to let God in! It is to open our hearts and let the fullness of the Presence that God already is in our lives, the energy of that, the true measure and magnitude of it, and all of the love that has carried us, into our hearts. It is to let that Presence sit in us and speak to us, to let it in-form us, in ways that are beyond language and beyond knowing. To dwell in God is to invite the Presence of Grace that is already here in to stay. And to let it wash everything else away.
Then I had the faintest glimmering of a vision of who Baba Lokenath is: the immense, Eternal, Unchangeable Presence who stands behind Baba, the Infinite Source who comes to me through Baba.
So laying there, praying still, a delicate light started coming through the crown of my head, merging with the light in my chest. It filled my torso, and then suddenly there was a great energetic rumble, a crashing release - mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical, all at once -- and I felt completely well again without even having raised my head.
So, all things considered, I couldn't have had a better birthday.
