Awestruck and tender-hearted

Awestruck and tender-hearted. Those seem to be the two states that most move me to click my fingers across the keyboard and pour out a share. It's been awhile. I've been busy being busy, master of distraction that I am. It only ever lasts so long. There are feelings to be felt, visions to be seen.

Awestruck or tender-hearted? Sometimes I am blessed with the sight and the perspective to experience both sensations at once: union. Others I stay transfixed on one end of the spectrum: separation.

So where do I sit tonight? Let us see. . .

Tender, for sure. My heart feels as if it's being penetrated from the inside out, like a flow of hot lava has begun to bubble beneath the surface and is just making itself known, burning tears streaming in place of the molten glow. They've been pricking at the backs of my eyes for a while now. Only in the last few days have I softened my surface layer enough to let them come forth. There's such a relief in letting go. Breathing deeper now. I hadn't realized I'd been holding back.

Observing, I find myself aware of my smallness, of the child inside of me crying out, longing to be held and cared for, as the me who hears and sees and feels her offers what comfort she can. She's tugging at me to go dance and play and be. Whoever said you needed to have a child outside of yourself to be a mother? What a task it is to learn how to love the little one within as well as she deserves!

My hands trace the warmth of the back of my neck, the thin skin of my throat and the gentle curves of my breasts. Soft, nurturing strokes, soothing the body that holds both the child and the woman, the body that holds the many stories of this soul's journey. There's a part of me who wishes the caresses would wipe away the pain I'm sitting with here. That's when I realize I'm in a state of separation, attached to the story of my tender heart. So I move to the middle, the union. From there, even as I acknowledge the wish, the deeper knowledge that the pain is one and the same as my greatest pleasure emerges, and I know I'd never want to be without the wholeness of my experience.

In my tenderness I find myself awestruck, amazed by the course my life is careening down as I speed from one transition to the next, one initiation to the next. I breathe into the ache of what's releasing and the yearning for what's to come. Pulsing with aliveness, pregnant with possibility, my body responds to creative urges my mind doesn't comprehend. I feel pulled in so many directions, my heart answering calls only it can feel, calls I cannot hear with all the logic and judgment and good sense I've supposedly accumulated over all these years.

And what's the use of accumulating, I wonder? So much stuff, physical, mental, emotional. I'm amazed at my capacity for it all, and as I come to understand my truly limitless nature, I become increasingly aware of my human limits. More and more I find myself wanting to shed what I've amassed, to have a load so light or one so easily handed off for a while, that I can allow myself to be taken by whichever breeze suits me in the moment. Where would I go? What would I find? Who would I be?

Such fun to ponder. Awe-inspiring indeed. The tantrika lives alongside the businesswoman who is the wild child loving the mother. There is no distinction. All are me. I am all. Union. Ever fluid. Ever free. Yet even as the She in me longs for the freedom of floating, of moving effortlessly among Her many incarnations, bound by neither time nor place, there is also the longing for home. A sanctuary, a space where all of me is safe and welcome and can rest comfortably to ground.

Awestruck and tender-hearted. In the middle. With me.