Folding In #48: A Woman on Fire

Living with thin skin and embracing (admitting) the singe of mid-life.

Danielle Mckinney. Hengki Koentjoro.Unknown.

*Please listen to audio version for the connected guided meditation.

I dreamed I was visited by a healer the other night. As he touched my chest, he pointed out an area of my body that has been inflamed these days due to rosacea. My Chinese medicine doctor describes it as stagnant Chi or heat. The healer placed his hands on my chest in the dream, and said, "This is grief. I'd follow grief anywhere. It means you are fully in touch with and feeling your life". After leaning me over, shaking around a bit, wobbling my head back and forth, he helped me back up.

Grief. Fire. Red Hot. Flames. Love. Flushed. Unhidden, unbridled. Naked. Exposed. Outed.

The last few years leading up to turning 40 have been filled with grief for me. In a sense, I feel like I'm carrying a giant barrel of heavy watery grief on my head and splashing it all over every room.

"I would follow grief anywhere," he said. "It tells me you're alive." 

My relationship with grief is complicated, mainly because I feel flawed because of it. I don’t love it. I feel like I've carried it since I was very young. Perhaps too young. Beginning with my first encounters with people in pain, fighting, storming around in small rooms, and slamming kitchen doors. In many ways, I have been grieving ever since I understood what life could mean. My innocence wore thin as the space between my youth and naivety widened. In the years of being splintered by motherhood, nursing a 14-year marriage with more love than I thought I had, and watching my parents age, grief has accompanied me. There is now a very palpable sense of foreboding, a sense that this life is a maze of sharp corners I have no choice but to confront. Love is what makes them sharp. Love pierces my heart daily. There is no telling what loss will do. Does this truth haunt me alone?

“This is grief, and I would follow it anywhere.”

I think the man in my dream was trying to communicate that this searing ball was positive. The red hot fire I feel on my chest. These flushed cheeks. But it's a wildfire that lives inside me, and I'm becoming ashamed of feeling so vulnerable without any protection or shield from it. Every silken web of blood can be seen through my thin skin. I've spent my whole life trying to thicken my skin. Toughening up. This is interesting. Heart on fire, Bursting blood. My translucent skin is throbbing with grief, excitement, love, expression, and joy. There is growing embarrassment.

We don't want others to know what we really carry inside. Safety is not guaranteed. Our best poker face is always on. Grief is not something we feel or admit. It's a 'dirty' word in some households. Have fun. Don't take it too seriously. It's obvious that you're overly sensitive. Like old sensors, these voices minted in my mind. The critics. Almost everything in me feels geared toward and for protection, and now, in every room, here's a woman on fire. There is a pool of heat in her heart. In the roses on her cheeks, around her throat. She is the color of a poppy, and she can't hide. 

I would follow grief anywhere, it means you're feeling your life fully. Maybe I would like to feel less than. Can I choose?

An old story goes that a man saw a blade above his head that was about to fall at any moment, so his secret to happiness was to sense that blade. Somehow, it made him happy. Over my head, I also feel the blade. The golden afternoon sun glints off it, and I see it as I close my eyes to sleep in the moonlight. A milky sheen crosses its sharp edge. As my eyes adjust to a new day, I always see the blade above my head at dawn. Skin that is thin. Fire in my chest. I experience grief as its manifestation. I am neither elated nor happy like the man in the story. Not yet at least.  

Is there something he perceives that I can't? Is it a difference in constitution? For him, happiness, for me, grief? Does he do anything that I am not understanding?

Thin skin. Nowhere to hide. Fire in the chest. Red hot core.

I have nothing but questions these days. Lying on the forest floor I ask her, "what am I doing wrong?" She responds, "Dearest love, what are you doing right?" To be disrobed like this. To have your defenses taken away. Complacency and numbness are stripped from you. To be forced to stand honestly, aglow with life's fire. My beloved, you are a vital spark. Don't be afraid. What have you been doing right?”

Perhaps all the hours you spend FEELING your life, experiencing joy, experiencing love, experiencing grief, are setting a web of fire through every path the blood in you travels. Perhaps you're flushed because life is responding to your listening by lighting up your body with light most are afraid to touch.

Can you feel your quivering, or has it gone underground? Aren't we all bruised lips and broken hearts, pretending we're not? Arms so wide you wish you could cradle the entire world, but you can't, and it hurts somewhere. If the man hadn't experienced grief first, would he have found happiness?

The part of the story we often gloss over is the stage of crawling on our hands and knees, hours of grappling, flat, on our backs. Watching the saber swing. Turning to fire, then ash, then a green blade of grass, then soft petals, then water, sun,moon, milk, a human without walls. A life, naked, unprotected, flushed. Perhaps he passed through the fire first, and forgot to tell us.

Aren't happiness and grief, after all, the same thing? Maybe his name for grief is happiness, while mine is sorrow. It's the same. The coin flip. The one of us stands in the tawny light of late afternoon smiling, the other tunnels underground seeking light. Beautiful both of them. The two make up a life.

Both are good, please help me understand.

Love,

A woman on fire.