I keep thinking of one of the vows Erik and I made when we married that went something like:
Let’s love each other in the Cosmic Erotic until we find something even more expansive.
I don’t think we had any idea of what that meant at the time. But we could taste it in the air somehow, taste it as a possibility in relationship. We didn’t know fully what it meant but we wanted to find out, we wanted to discover, to experience, to live into something unbounded and expansive.
Some days I can still feel this possibility. I can still taste it. It’s a vow that comes back to me now as it doesn’t rely on regular life or even on our bodies still being in one place, or even still existing.
Today, I sat alone in a park with my eyes closed for an hour. As I sat there, I thought:
The loss of the Beloved creates a kind of opening. The singularity of my Beloved is no longer here. That intoxicating focus of love and tenderness and eros.
The loss of the beloved, the loss of Erik… shatters my relationship to the beloved. And now at times I can feel the Beloved everywhere. A larger Beloved. The beloved I experienced within and through Erik. I can feel it in the softness of the air today.
It reminds me of the Jewish creation story about the divine light gathered into one vessel that gets broken and the shards of the divine scatter throughout the world.
It also reminds me of different theories of time and my own wonky understanding of Chronos Time and Kairos Time.
Chronos Time is normal time, the events of life, the seasons, the normal course of things. It’s how we measure our days and lives quantitatively.
Kairos Time is cosmic time, moments when regular life opens and new things can emerge, where nothing is normal, where the impossible becomes actual. A moment in Kairos time can disrupt the course of a life or expand and deepen it. A moment can open onto eternity.
In regular, Chronos time, Erik is gone. There is a huge emptiness, a screaming silence, a million little and big losses. But in Kairos time, he is there in the tenderness of the air, like the soft shimmering light of the divine in everything. In Kairos Time, there’s a sense of his imprint for all of eternity. The deep connection with Being itself.
It’s so subtle, like one step to the left or right of grief is all loss and contraction and meaninglessness. And one step in the other direction is a great opening, a connection to something larger. I feel like all I do these days is step back and forth…. between great contraction and loss… and soft opening.
I’m also learning, slowly slowly, to make a choice for expansion. Like a tantric experiment… how to open to all of it, to more and more reality, with all its pain and loss and beauty.
And then some days, I am just so tired. And it feels like I’m am just sitting in this new world and looking around in bewilderment.
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