I am aflame. No one set the fire. This is self-. I don’t think I knew what I was signing on for when this all started. But there’s no stopping the fires of transformation, once they’ve begun lapping at your skin. I climbed up here on this pyre. Said I wanted to be awake. Declared the intention to set free all the structures that tie me down. Hold me back. Stop me from becoming. I think I had very romantic notions of what that would look like. Imagined I could rise without the burning. Envisioned grace descending in a peaceful, quiet hush. I forgot how this whole phoenix business works...No one tells you the truth about being a phoenix. How this kind of burning – the kind that strips you of everything you are so you can be made new – hurts like hell. You feel it. All. Every tiny, bright tendril consuming all you have ever been. Resistance is as useless to you as a pair of shoes you wore when you were six. Once ignited no amount of water will put out this cleansing. Anything short of complete surrender only prolongs the burn. Inside the flames, I am learning the hard way how to let go. It is the most fucking painful thing. There aren’t instructions on how to manage this process – it’s too personal. We’re all just winging it. And it’s so easy to get lost in the fear. To forget that things are not worse now, they’re just visible. Unveiled. Brought to the surface so they can be transformed.
Grace finally comes. Not in a peaceful, quiet hush. But in the arms of panic attacks and the inability to pretend to have it together for one more fucking second. Who knew grace would show up like that? ...When it is done and I am burned to the ground, there is peace. Inside that peace, deep down in the ashes new life stirs. What she becomes is not for me to know or project. Only to witness. An awe-struck observer watching how this magic of being human works.
How we can be reborn again and again in the same lifetime. How in spite of – or maybe even because of – the fear, the death throes, and the pain of it all, we rise. Indomitably. Eternally. We rise.
