Longer Than...

Over the past year I have heard, and said the words:  “I love you” more times than the days of my entire life combined.  I have heard it from old friends from childhood, kindred yogis met on my spiritual pilgrimages, from people in my church family and dear brothers and sisters who have been there from “day one”.

In my “About Me” bio on this blog, the first line reads: “I was born under an angry sky”, and so I was.  


The home I was born into was full of turmoil, and by the time I came along, my mother was only a shell of her true self.  In many ways, I never had the privilege of really knowing her.

My parents had just reunited from their first real attempt to split in 1966.  In the separation of my mom and dad, it had looked to my brothers and sisters like they would finally be freed from the mayhem.  Yet, a short time after these two incompatibles sublimated back together, I was conceived; and this was the energy I came into this world on. 

At the news of my mother’s pregnancy, there was no escape for my siblings, or my mother; that door was now permanently closed...No community to support her in reclaiming the moxie from her youth.  


She had been in former days, a good mix between tomboy and beauty queen; but by the time I came along she resembled neither. The only thing left in her, was the tenacity to stay in a bad situation, which didn’t really serve her at all. I can estimate with a fair amount of accuracy, that she used each moment as an opportunity to escape from herself, and do what she could to make things look normal from the outside.  It gave her the vapor of satisfaction in her struggles.

So on the day I came into this world I was keenly aware of the mixed feelings at my arrival.  It would take many years for me to clear this "angry sky" identity. 

To hear the words: “I love you” in my family felt a little bit pretend.  My father only used the words sarcastically, and my mother said it so often, without physical touching, and a with a painful ring of desperation in her voice, it was a little like white noise.  

She desperately needed to hear it for herself, from her “Self” (with a capital S), most of all; but ultimately, she had to protect and maintain.  There was not a cultural container for her to heal herself, protect her children, and scale the mountainous journey that would bring her to the place where she could authentically be able to know or give that kind of love.  So instead she did the best she could muster.

I my own life, there have been a spectrum of resources available for healing and awakening.  A spectrum of support and modalities that surpass anything that former generations of women could ever hope for.  I’ve taken advantage of most of them, and felt I had come to a really good place.  

Particularly through Bodhi Yoga,  I have been fortunate enough to build my life around “the business” of learning to love--to feel it for ourselves, to give and receive it for others, and to learn to love our physical lives, as a huge opportunity to evolve our soul.  

After so much awakening, it had not occurred to me that I still had a void that needed to be healed, in the way I was born into this world.

Though I intellectually knew I loved and felt love from my siblings, I never actually felt a deep kind of familial love, until the birth of my beloved son Tom.  It blew my heart open and empowered me to heal so many of the distortions of my own young life.  

Tom’s birth put me on the path where I met my beloved friend and work partner Rex.  From our first meeting, he knew me inside and out; it would take me several years of skepticism, before I would own that I felt the same for him.  Of all the people I will ever know on this planet, Rex knew me best, and still truly loved me.  To his credit there are many that can say the same thing.

One of the great tragedies of love, is that we try to classify it, to say what it means and where it should or shouldn’t be.  Rex taught me that giving and receiving real love is not classifiable, it is eternal; a Godly quality, that we humans are doing our best to put to use, under a very unusual circumstance called mortality. 

In talking to a friend recently about him, she stopped me and said:  “You are describing Agape, the highest order of non-possessive, unconditional love.”  This was right on.  Rex had tried to explain it to me before himself, so many times, and I now got it.  When we run across souls we have known for eternities, Agape is the ancient love we have always felt for each other.  It is the love we can glimpse between ourselves and God, if we are lucky.

So nearly a year ago, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I yet again faced another very angry sky.  In so many ways it was similar to the time I was born.  My older sister Jeanie was again there caudaling me, and over the 9 months of treatments, I was bathed in love and care from so many of you.  

The experience of being so vulnerable that all you can do is receive a tidal wave of love (while incubated in intensity), has given me a felt sense; and I can honestly say that I know now, what it is like for a baby to come in through so much love, just because she breathes.  

Particularly, from my two  older brothers and three older sisters, and younger sister Twila, who I have felt supporting me on a moment to moment basis, from far away and close by.   

I know better now on such a deep and enduring layer, how much they love me, and are truly happy I am here; a depth of healing in those words that have freed all seven of us from tough days, now long gone.

In such a unique way, one of the things I have learned (through what most people think of as the worst possible scenario of cancer), is that the love that carried me through it, simultaneously healed something greater in me.  It gave me the birth story I never had before, and what a multidimensional gift it has been, as I scale the arduous journey of recovering from the nine months of treatment. 

A month or so ago I was driving away from Rex’s grave, where I had left flowers, and the song by Dan Fogelberg called: “Longer” came on.  The lyrics of this song talk about Agape, the ancient love.  


As I listened to the words, I was surprised that the lyrics didn’t necessarily remind me of Rex, and how he loved to play and sing Fogelberg’s songs on his guitar; or even our enigmatic Agape. 

The lyrics felt more like a ballad from my Heavenly Father; a relationship I have had to climb up to; weathering many an angry sky, in order to feel for myself.  Listening to the song, I heard the words in a new way and felt them as God’s words to me:

“Longer than there’ve been stars up in the Heavens, I’ve been in love with you”...


Those words touched my heart in a whole knew way, as I thought to myself, (for the first time in my life, at 44 years old), with fuzzy new baby hair sprouting in on my head:

When it comes to Agape, and the only true father I’ve known, 


my Godly Father, 


the Father of my soul, 


I can gratefully say today, 


that I am, at long last,  a daddy’s girl.


Thanks to each of you for the kind gestures that have reminded me of His awareness of me, as an individual, as his daughter.  It is my prayer on this Father's Day, that those who haven't known Agape yet will glimpse it for themselves through these words.


Namaste


Syl