By Amaya Gayle Gregory
Sedona, Az — I see what I need to see, the perfect thing to move me along my unique path. Infinite worlds are appearing as one, taking on the mantle of sky and earth, of rich greens and the spectrum of blues, and yet, colored by how I look, the stories within my heart and mind, the expectations and beliefs that have worked their way into the tiny cracks and fissures of my particular anchor in the sea.
Yesterday a friend responded to my piece about all that I didn’t know, and spilled her soul into the depths of my cells. She spoke to her experience of life, the world we are living in, the promises of freedom that are falling away, and at the end she said, and I paraphrase, that maybe we never had them, that perhaps it was a highly programmed illusion, never truly real.
Her words stayed with me and played inside my mind, sending this little body into a bit of a swirling whirlpool, a reckoning that churned my gut with a tinge of nausea. It didn’t last long. It felt like the last vestige of belief in my country simply died. Was it never real? Was it always a beautifully executed mass delusion? Were we entrained to see what others believed, what those in our world saw or wanted us to see?
It was undeniable once I read her words. It was here all along. I had simply chosen not to acknowledge it, to let the genie out of the bottle. Spiritually it was obvious. I had seen the illusion in my delusion years ago. My mind was already prepped. My body hadn’t quite caught up. You’d think it worked the other way, that we’d get it physically first and it would ripple into the mind, and then heart and soul, but in my experience that is catawampus. Here in 3D. the body is usually the last to get it. When the fallout arrives it feels like having to repeat a lesson already learned, but in actuality the lesson never stopped. Nothing does. It is always moving, percolating through the denser layers of reality. As far as I can tell, there is no end.
What hit my body, the material layer, was that my country wasn’t in the same world, let alone the same universe, as those who were black and brown, gay or trans, rich and powerful, poor and helpless, younger or older, hopeless and hungry, angry, disconnected and criminal, manipulative or merely end justifying, men and women.
I didn’t know, don’t know, their worlds. I never will. My world is a sweet cocoon of rights and protections, words taken literally, the power of good, the natural outflow of caring and compassion, love and inclusion. That is my world, or it was.
How can I say what is right and what is wrong? I only know my world and it had just fallen apart like Humpty Dumpty, not on a theoretical level, but all the way down to raw bones. I had to ask myself, just what world are you hanging onto? The answer escaped me. Even though the loss of that world ached in my marrow, there was no loss other than being awoken from a juvenile dream.
When nothing remains of the dream, the body breathes a sigh of relief. There is no dream to defend, no dream to protect.
The collective dream remains, seen to be a dream, consciously experienced as a dream, and I, the dreamed character, continue to dream walk. Although, without the need to protect and defend, what remains isn’t the angst and constant argument with life, the doubt about what I should be doing, or worry over doing it right or wrong. What remains is love, love for all the dreams and dreamers, love for this unfolding messy grotesque crazy beautiful masterpiece.
And love, despite its bad rap, isn’t all warm and fuzzy. It can be fierce, radical, a dance of anarchy. Left to its natural, unhindered flow it seeps into the world with amazing grace. These times are precious. Yes, they are filled with suffering and pain, but they are also powerful beyond words. They are shaking the tree of complacency, uprooting the hidden beliefs and stories, showing us clearly, undeniably what we didn’t know, the knowing that was based in fairytales, the certainty of our certainty.
Years ago, in my sadness at the state of the world, I asked the question, ‘Am I just here to witness Rome burn, or am I a vessel to ground love, a wrench to pry open the spigot of caring and compassion?’ Of course, at that moment in my ego’s story, I was rooting for the flood, one rivaling the stories of Noah, but every time I have asked, the answer has been the same. They are not mutually exclusive.