I find the Gene Key of the week to be illuminatingly prescient for my life - every single week. This week, we contemplate the shadow of Desire, which is the path of Lightness leading to the Siddhi (or realization) of Rapture.
In the deep dive of grief I’ve been on recently with my mom’s health declining, it occurs to me that grief is a face of desire. (Or maybe it’s an ass of desire?) I desire to see my mom healthy, happy, thriving, and present. This desire is doomed to be unfulfilled by her Alzheimer’s state. And so I experience the pain of unfulfilled desire - grief. I grieve the impossibility to continue our previous relationship dynamic. I grieve the loss of her presence even when we are together. Each time someone asks me if she still remembers me, I grieve the difficulty in even answering that question.
It’s not that she doesn’t remember me. The construct of “remembering” doesn’t apply any longer. Entire parts of my mom’s brain are powering down, leaving her without the ability to form words, connect words to concepts, or interpret feelings into actions. Viewed from the outside, she can form some words or, more and more, single syllables of words strung together, but they are in a language I do not know. She makes sounds that mimic conversation, but in this plane of reality are like incomplete snake-skins left behind in the forest, no longer containing the expression within. The creature has moved on, continuing to grow and change and has discarded that which no longer suits it.
I experience this transformation as loss because I can no longer connect with her in the old familiar way. Mom is dropping the skin of language as she begins to wriggle free into the rest of the forest which is the eternal Love field to which I believe we all return at death. The technologies for connection, such as language, we’ve developed on this plane will not support her where she is going. In fact she doesn’t need them for her destination, for where she is headed IS connection. There is no separation that needs the bridge of language in the field of Love, no gravity that requires a body to move her around, or hunger needing fulfilling. So she is shedding skin after skin of useless form that were her methods of survival on this plane, that she may remember the formless eternal.
I think of life as a great spiral, and the lessons we each must learn personally (such as setting healthy boundaries or how to be with change) as things we do not learn once but spiral around and around to revisit. Each time, we get the chance to look at how far we’ve come in our work with the topic, and take the next step in our learning with it. Mom has graduated to the next arm of the spiral. Here, she practiced shedding people, relationships, jobs, and roles that no longer suited her. This next step of the great spiral now presents her the opportunity to again shed what no longer serves: this time, the vessel of her body and mind.
When I think about these things I wonder, why do I feel compelled to redefine her death in this way? Am I attempting to cheer myself up? Am I trying to escape the seemingly unending sadness of watching her slip away tiny bit by tiny bit? Am I choosing to instead see her as going on to her Rapture, released from the skin suit that protected her on this part of a much longer journey than my mind can conceptualize?
Maybe then, this is her path of Lightness. She’s letting go.
Can I, then, follow her example?
As I sit with the discomfort of unfulfilled desire, I witness the dawning of Lightness. I feel on my face the warm rays of letting it all go. No more worrying or trying to hang on to what I’ve got. It’s all going to go anyway. It’s all going to be left behind on the forest floor eventually - do I really need it now? Do I really need the things I cling to? Wanting to be approved of by others. Wanting to know I’m making a difference in people’s lives, that I’m fulfilling my Purpose or living On Purpose. Let it go. Just be. Keep breathing. Keep doing the work I’ve chosen, until something new becomes clear, and then do that. Keep loving to the best of my ability, and keep forgiving myself my imperfections. Keep accepting my limitations and loving myself more. I’m doing a really good job of being limited to a human body with a confused and limited human mind on this plane. I’m doing my best, and I’m choosing less stress. I’m loving those around me, and I’m really feeling my feelings. They’re all here, so why not?
This feels maybe like the Lightness described as the pathway of this Gene Key. I notice that this path can’t even be stepped on as long as I’m stuck in the shadow. The path is Lightness, but Desire is HEAVY. Feeling how strong the pull of Desire is on me, I’m only at the very, verrrrry beginning of this path.
And so I cannot comment on the Siddhi of Rapture, at least not yet. I see it out there, the great big everything else at the end of the arms of the spiral. I know it’s where I’m headed. I choose the path of Lightness to bring me there, floating as I do upon this spiral arm of the Milky Way, in this one galaxy amidst countless others, in this uni/multiverse of Love.