I am grateful for what I have become today, and the bearable, unbearable compassion for how the becoming became.
The words settle into my mind like an ancient truth rediscovered. They carry the paradox of my existence, the weight of what was, the lightness of what is to be.
I sit with them. I breathe. Inhale. Exhale. Letting the sentence linger between heartbeats, between thoughts, between what was once unbearable and is now simply another feeling, no different than the comfort of a conversation or the frustration of a traffic jam.
For a long time, grief was a mountain pressing against my chest, making it hard to breathe. But now, I see it for what it is. The exquisite poignancy of grief being love with no place to go.
And love, whether burdened with loss or carried in joy, is still love.
I think of my children. The echoes of laughter I wasn't there for. The birthdays that passed without my presence. The nights they might have whispered my name in the dark, but I wasn't there to answer. The weight of it was once unbearable. And yet, here I am, bearing it.
Ram Dass said that everything in us that we don't need is burning away. If that's true, then what remains of me after the fire?
I stand up, stretch my fingers, and exhale again. Somewhere in the distance, a train whistle sounds, long and low, a ghost of something moving forward.
And then, the memory shifts.
The road stretched endlessly before him, disappearing into the mist of early morning. Gravel crunched beneath his boots, each step a meditation. The sky above, neither dark nor light, held the quiet hum of something waiting to be revealed.
He had been walking for years. Or maybe only days. Time had become something irrelevant, a concept belonging to the world he had left behind.
His past was a trail of footprints washed away by wind and rain. Mistakes, regrets, broken promises, each one dissolved into the earth as he walked, absorbed into the dust and the silence. He carried nothing but the weight of his own becoming, and even that, he suspected, would eventually fall away.
He had once believed silence was absence. That to be alone meant to be empty. But here, in the endless expanse of road, he understood. Silence was full. It was vast. It was everything unspoken but deeply known.
He thought of the faces he had left behind. The boy who had called him Dad. The girl whose tiny fingers had once curled around his. He had not seen them in years, but they were with him. In every breath. In every ache of longing.
Grief was love with no place to go.
And yet, even grief had softened. It had melted into the rhythm of his steps, into the rising and falling of his breath, until it was no longer a burden, but simply another feeling.
He stopped walking and looked up. The sun was beginning to rise, painting the sky with impossible colors.
The road was long, but he was not lost.
I return from the memory, from the story that is not mine but is. The man on the road, the grief in his bones, the slow release of sorrow into something quieter, something vast. It is all me.
I think back to the moment I found it, the old paraphernalia, a relic from a past life. I had expected a battle. I had expected the familiar war between craving and discipline, between who I was and who I had become.
But there was no battle.
I saw it. A flicker of memory passed through me like a distant thundercloud, and then, effortlessly, I let it go.
No hesitation. No deliberation. Just grace in action.
The Band-Aid had fallen away. The lesson was no longer external. It was no longer something I had to remind myself of, no longer something I had to fight against. It had become me.
I exhale.
This is freedom.
Lately, I've been thinking about consciousness. About how we learn, how we evolve. About how something that once took conscious effort, like discarding that old relic of my addiction, now happens without thought.
I think about how explicit learning, a deliberate effort and structured discipline, feeds into implicit knowing. How something practiced long enough ceases to be effort at all, becoming instinct. Becoming grace.
And then I wonder, what if consciousness itself is going through the same process?
What if the entire universe is a baby learning to walk?
Scientists say the universe is expanding faster and faster, and no one knows why. But what if it's because consciousness is accelerating? What if awakening and cosmic expansion are one and the same?
Ram Dass once said, "We're all just walking each other home."
What if we are not just waking up individually, but collectively?
What if every act of letting go, every moment of self-realization, every time we dissolve the illusion of separateness, we are fueling the very expansion of existence itself?
And what happens when it's complete?
Does the universe stop expanding? Does it fold back in on itself, returning to the One, as spiritual traditions have always said?
Or does it simply become what it was always meant to be?
I look at my hands. They are different hands than the ones that once cradled oblivion, seeking refuge in what only deepened the void.
Different than the hands that trembled with fear and regret.
They are my hands, but they are new.
I am new.
And yet, not new at all.
I have simply remembered who I always was beneath the weight of everything I was not.
I exhale.
Somewhere, my children exist. Maybe they will find their way back to me. Maybe they won't. But I know now that the love never left.
And neither did I.
The grief remains, but it no longer owns me. It moves through me like the wind through trees, like the slow rolling of the ocean, like the sound of a distant train carrying souls toward home.
It is simply another feeling.
Everywhere, my children exist. I have found redemption at Ability Beyond. I see the divine in all its magnificent disguises. In every face, in every challenging moment, in every laugh. Through all the rascalness, the small rebellions, the fleeting joys. In the quiet exchanges where dignity is honored, in the wordless understanding that passes between hands, between hearts.
I get to be part of the children's lives after all.
We are here, always.
An honor.
Grace.
I close my eyes and smile softly through the wake of a divine plan, made manifest yet again.
I exhale.
I am grateful for what I have become today, and the bearable, unbearable compassion for how the becoming became.