Dreaming Myself Alive

Three years ago today marks the anniversary of my death. It happened suddenly though the symptoms had been there for a few weeks. Even as I write about it I feel the lump in my throat and the involuntary downturn of my mouth as tears press to flow wildly. I must have known I was going to die. I began to cry when I was near him without knowing why. His cruelty was not something I knew about yet but it came as a chill wind in advance of his actions, the way Harry Potter feels Dementors, and before Harry, Frodo felt the Wraithes.

HE killed me. In all honesty I put my own throat out for him to cut, opened my heart up to him. I thought he was alive, a human being, someone with a genuine heart and soul. He was a coward, a fraud, fake. I know this now. He survives by camouflage. His cover is so deep it took me many years to figure this out and only after we became closer than he had ever been to another human being. Then the knives came out and he carved me to bits and left me for dead.

Dying while alive is no tunnel filled with white light. Dying while alive is agonizing. I think I get the fascination with zombies…I was one so I guess others are too. One of the people first on scene told me I was in a spiritual emergency. She helped to frame what would become the next three years. An energetic healer told me I lost nearly all of my chi, the spiritual equivalent of bleeding out.

My life priorities became totally altered. Imagine losing your connection to everything that ever brought you joy or passion. I spent enormous amounts of time sitting in meditation with what was underneath all the feelings of pain and loss. One dear friend literally sat with me to help me know how to be with myself in suffering.

A few days ago I was able to say that his murder of me was a gift. Living in a stripped down way made what is most essential and vital readily apparent once I was ready to experience this. Following the smallest sparks of interest led me into living life from a very different place. It turns out that what HE killed, the places he stuck his knives into, were parts of me that needed to die. He can’t help that he is a vampire and knows where and how to suck the vitality from another. But I now understand that I am the one who holds myself, no one else, and I was not aware of where I was not caring for myself. Now I have learned how to hold myself, to live with wholeness, a holiness, that I did not know before.

There is talk about the caterpillar turning in to the butterfly. I learned about the period of time in which this small being is mush, neither one thing nor the other. I was mush. In the mush there are dreamer cells that are the cells that orient the mush towards new life. Those few cells know when they are being called to orient. I knew it too. The small flames were vivid, having lived for nearly a year in the dark without any sense of a dream, when the cells began to call and orient my life. It is a miraculous gift life holds, this ability to regenerate. I am in awe on this day, three years after I died, that I am once again alive, dreamed alive by life...new and different.