This lancet window of mine

Losing myself at the source of all light

The idea of writing about myself, for myself, is like walking in a foreign land. In this season of life, and really, in this incarnation - I’ve come to find myself acting in service of so many others, and often least of all, myself. It’s through the channel of serving the collective that I find any meaning or purpose, anyway, so like an ouroborous, we continue to lovingly devour one another.

But as month fourteen since giving birth a second time arrives, I feel a deepening sigh in my body arriving some evenings. Oh, there she is. I’m re-entering the corridors of my own spirit, untethered - no swelling belly, no nursing, clinging baby. I see now there is the most incredible sunlight emanating from a lancet window which is my own, in my own castle, in my own soul, which no other may look out of.

It’s silent here. After almost 35 years I find less and less to say, though it seems that the divine still demands an offering in writing from time to time. The exterior of this abode is renewed each spring and summer by sunlight alone, and the interior grows larger and larger, so large it rests not solely within its frame. This body, as Anandamayi Ma says.

My mentor, Hanna, says that thoughts do not originate from inside of us. They are visitors, dancing on the periphery of our being, coming and going from our awareness. Therefore, this white page is a space for them to step out of me and if you will it, into you for a time. The words of Hanna reverberate around in my head, like the most potent of visitors, echoing: your eternal disposition is the only win-win situation on Earth.

The castle of the mind. A place absent disruption, disturbance. But only because the traveler entering has crossed over an entire expanse of the mind full of ruin. There, lays every failure one could make while genuinely doing their best. There is where we crossed the desert, yes, but stopping to disappoint a thousand times over. That is in many ways the act of mothering. The terrifying, humbling act of truly giving yourself over to something fully with total surrender, while still bearing the weight of your imperfection in every moment.

I’m thankful to hear the echo of my feet on the cold stone floor and have no one to witness me. Here is more hidden than my own bathroom, for my children cannot find me and crawl atop my lap. I am not seen. My actions can remain unjudged by the masses. Whether I am wrinkled or disheveled or dirty, no one will know. If I sleep with abandon for 13 hours straight no one would have anything to say. I visit this reprieve of a dream like dipping my finger into a perfectly still glass of cold water.

How delightful it is. To step out of the gown of mother, and into the nothingness of a tower-locked woman of unknown origin. I breathe more deeply. I breathe just for myself. Not to carry me to the next moment and the next moment for them - just me. I don’t require much, comparatively. Absent the full womb or fuller arms, I feel small again. So very small. This form is just enough to carry me the distance. Back to the lancet window. So I might look again.

Absolutely nothing in my life has ever arrived to heal me. Only to transform me. I let the pause of nothingness and simplicity in the tower window be beautiful, knowing it too holds something to break me open again. This is not healed. This is still becoming.

Here though, the mother has enough time to wait. To step out of her skin and into something less constricting. Here when she sighs, her breath doesn’t stop at the confines of body - she just keeps expanding. The ripples circling out from the finger in the cold glass of water, going on forever. The light on the outside of the lancet window emanating upward.

She is not yet old. This lancet window is a passing place. Here she sits like a cat waiting for the mouse, knowing it lives within her. The spiral goes round and round, like the staircase which brings her here. Here we wait. I’m not afraid of the pattern. The journey. The inevitability of ouroborous and what it reveals to us: origin. Homeland. From thrashing to still. From tangled to a single thread that slips up through the highest opening in the highest point of this body and goes ever higher, beyond recognition.

To the still point. Losing myself at the source of all light.

Soon, my baby will wake and I will go to her, and I will drop this feeling of everlasting. I’ll try to pick it up again, but maybe not soon. So that is why this visitor, this thought traveler of mine, needed to find its way into the realm of another welcoming mind. Yours. Let it stay for awhile.