Treading water

Dhumavati

This morning I talked to Meg, a friend of mine from church back home. She is an older woman, a former nun, who always welcomed me with open arms and held me on my last visit to Good Shepherd as I cried, unable to bear the sight of my ex-husband with his new girlfriend and my children going to communion. It was my last visit to church before I left for California. I told her that I had run away because I felt that everything that I was and had been was gone. I came to California hoping to start a new life, but I have been pulled back by my need to be a parent. My children still need me, and I need them. Just because I am no longer married to their father does not mean I can't be their mother. I am not giving that up; time with my children, the people I love, is too precious.

At the time, though,  I didn't know how to face my loss. She told me that I had done the right thing, that everything would work out as it should, that I was loved, and that I could come home without shame or regret. She also told me to "tread water" in these last weeks in California.

"Stop trying to swim," she said.

I realized that I had been fighting the current that I thought I had just been flowing with.

But this was something more.

"Treading water" means to neither allow the flow of the water to take you nor to try to swim against it.
To tread water is to attempt to stay afloat, to use the least amount of energy to stay in one place with your head above the waves in order to avoid drowning.

After we talked, I meditated a bit and then found myself reaching for Sally Kempton's book Awakening Shakti, which details the different goddesses of yoga. I have been reading this book for many months, meditating on one goddess at a time. Durga helped me find strength, Khali destroyed and helped me clear, Parvati taught me devotion.

Today, I opened to Dhumavati, the goddess of loss and dissolution, the goddess of smoke. She is not one of the favored ones; she is not beautiful. Her boon is the resurrection after losing everything. Facing her and looking into her eyes means facing all the fears of being alone and without all the things that one has been accustomed to having. I have been running from her.

Meg asked me what troubled me most. I told her that the loss of relationship with my children and the sense that I had lost my identity were my greatest torments.

She told me that I still was myself, that I would find my true self in this loss, and that I would one day see that I had become even more true to myself than I had ever been because of it.

Until then, I need to tread water.

Namste' ya'll.