Union and Separation

Union and Separation

Something happened to me this year. My friends wonder about me now. I wonder about myself. I am acting so differently, so unlike me - like a deer in headlights. What happened to me is unspeakable, unnamable, unable to be contained in words.

You could say I experienced an extended altered state of union for months. Life was charged through and through with itself. Everything in the forge of the gods - all fire - melted, hammered, molded, alloyed with everything else as the gods pleased.

I can tell you it was precipitated by a series of apparently unrelated events. A year off from work, a war, praying to learn how to live in the freedom of lady poverty. There was creativity. There was a journey to the Tenderloin streets of San Francisco. I buried my mother, felt ancestral presence. Images, movement of images, silence. I can say I have never felt so close to life or death and it was all beautiful.

That state ended in a crash landing - a big thud. I felt an odd embarrassment - a shyness. I scrambled to make sense, to frame the experience in the mind, in my heart. None of that worked. I said and did things that made people uncomfortable. Attempts at communication only made confusion in the world of separation which in itself is a state of being that is very beautiful.

When that experience of union ended I was stripped bones bleaching in the sun. I know better then be attached to states of feeling, mood, mental images, ideas; or to have aversion them. Let the bones sing, I said. I wrote bone poems but I was still attached to union. Any brief encounter with union still stuns me - the sun coloring clouds, how wildfire ashes the sky, the way rain soaks into the earth and greens. It's not these things exactly, its the experience under these things that makes me mute.

For someone like me words are magic and sensual. I can taste them, walk on them like a path, hide in them as if they approached truth. Now, words sometimes feel like a cover up like "preemptive strike". Letter by letter they fall into an abyss.

Images. I watch them. I buy into them; extricate myself from them. Abdul Baha calls them "idle fancies, vain imaginations". Deliver us from them, God. Even God evokes images. "Begone, images, begone." They don't go. They just shift and change in a dance but under that dance I have felt and sometimes still feel mute silence.

Our own Brother Lorenz reminds me that symbol is one step away from

experience. Words are two steps away, a poor substitute.

I have not mentioned love because if I uttered the word then the experience might be diminished by my image of love or yours. Yet the word can reveal as well as conceal. I found in the poem, The Difficult Word by Robert Bly something that made me leap for joy.

The Difficult Word

The oaks reluctantly let their leaves fall,

And hesitatingly allow their branches to be bare;

And the bear spends all winter in separation.

The beauty of marriage is such that it dissolves

All earlier union, and leads man and wife

To walk together on the road of separation.

It's a difficult word. The thought frightens us

that this planet with all its darkening geese

Was created not for union but for separation.

Suppose there were a dragon curled inside each drop

Of water, defending it's gold. It's possible

That abundance has the same effect as separation.

We all knew nothing of this when we floated

In the joy of the womb; but when our lips touched

Our mother's breast, we said, “this is separation.”

It is my longing to smooth the feathers

Of brown birds, and to touch the sides of horses

That has led me to spend my life in separation.

Robert Bly

from The Night Abraham Called to the Stars

"It is my longing ... that has led me to spend my life in separation."

I find myself touching things differently now, hovering between the worlds and reaching out "to touch the sides of horses", "to smooth the feather's of brown birds."

Today for me is very different those days of union last year. I am working sometimes 70 hours a week with the chronically mentally ill substance abusing homeless, back to work I said I would never do again.

The residents take turns cooking. Sometimes uneaten meals get thrown in the trash because of the fear of being poisoned. Sometimes people have trouble cooking because they are afraid that they might be poisoning people.

We, the "sane" people, give our children's blood in war to an idea like preemptive strike that has no ground in our senses or in reality. Yet we ignore receding glaciers, the warming of the gulf stream, the melting of the polar ice caps. Things we actually feel with our senses like global warming apparently have no power to move us in new directions.

It is said that God conceals the godself in each cell of creation and perhaps even in words and images. I brought a garden statue of Francis with a bird on his hand - a bargain marked down to ten dollars. The residents at work and I found a place in the garden for this wild ex POW whose heart was so tender birds would land on him. The residents went in for group. I followed when a bird landed on the doorstep and then in my hand.

I accepted it as a moment when things reveal themselves in union. Then I felt Francis was letting me know I was not alone at this place. His spirit was with me -would make me strong. I brought the bird in my hand into group. It stayed on my hand until I opened a window and it flew away. Grace is strange, like a bird that lands out of nowhere when you are about to give up.

Did I overlay this experience with an idea of Francis because I was afraid to fully enter union with it? Or did I name what occurred in the experience? I don't know. Even if I did know this writing is not really what I mean to say. But it is as close as I can get today.

Barbara Flaherty

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