Eagle

Eagle – The East

Help me to dream bigger dreams and make them real. Give me a wider view; let me fly wingtip to wingtip with you.

The final direction in the medicine wheel is East. After my brother died, I moved to the East side of Maui for one year. East is the direction of wisdom, of a wider view.

How do you see loss as a gift? It takes a while to get there, and even then, you flicker in and out. Kind of like a dream at the edge of wakefulness.

Last full moon (this is sort of how we tell time in the jungle), my friend and I were rolling around naked in the red sand at a nearby beach, applying natural facials and body scrubs and jumping in and out of what locals call the “washing machine” wave pool.

“Want to do a desire session?” she asked.

“Ok.” I sat up and gazed toward the turquoise surf.

“What do you want?” she asked. I closed my eyes, expecting to imagine a hot man and a gorgeous small house in an isolated wilderness.

The answer leapt out, fierce and clear. “Freedom.” I tried to reason with the answer. “Yes, but, chocolate?'“ my thoughts stammered…”vacations? Lovers?.” The answer was unwavering.

Freedom spoke to me. You could have those things, said freedom, and they could control you. Equanimity, what I’d thought was one of the most boring of virtues, turned out to be the deepest desire of my hidden heart.

When I think of my brother’s death, I teeter at the precipice of love as a chasm, a deep black emptiness. There are parts of me that don’t want to jump.

Freedom is not comfortable. Most people I confide in lately, and respect, have oddly said a similar thing: you choose, and you keep choosing. You choose freedom over comfort.

The grief is only as vast as the love. They are two sides of the same experience.

After my brother killed himself, I went to Maui, mainly to live above a waterfall in a tiny glass cabin, and dig things up from the dirt for dinner and pick things from trees for other meals and just basically dissolve into nature. I preferred for a while to be a plant, or a part of the river, or a stone. It was the elements that taught me dissolution, and ironically, also taught me how to re-orient back into life.

In the meantime, I was splitting my time between Ram Dass’ house and the rest of the time, living with not a very nice man. Even when this man and his inebriated buddies slammed a sailboat into a shallow tropical reef, 20 ton steel anchors flying overhead, and sharks lurking around, I clung tenaciously to our wreck of a connection.

When things fell apart (the final time) I’d been saying Tara mantras and walked into the bathroom to find him in the shower.

“I’m not alone,” he yelled.

“What is happening?” I asked.

“I need someone that shares my vices,” he said. Things usually seemed very simple for him.

They were not simple for me. My heart felt like it was shredding. I kept approaching the edge of an unfamiliar darkness.

What I’ve since begun to understand is how enmeshed my feelings about losing my brother and losing this man were then. In letting the man go, there was a part of me that had to (did not want to; could not) admit that I had to let my brother go. I had conflated them in my mind; maybe they were similar because they struggled in some of the same ways. I had to admit my powerlessness: I could not fix things for either of them. I didn’t want to focus on this chasm within me that was filled by trying to fix things with and for men, either.

Maybe too I just needed a placeholder of a year, a way to distract from the full realization of what I’d lost in this world because if I opened to it at that time, I really would break.

This toxic relationship was my wise psyche sticking a finger in the dam. The tsunami was coming. But I needed a minute to collect myself. The year I was with the man was a time to get stronger.

When I was strong enough, the goddess directly severed the tie. I was saying her mantra. Tara has eyes in her four hands. She is the swift, compassionate energy of enlightened action. This was a message impossible to ignore. From there, I could not go back. Grief poured through the dam, and swept away parts of myself that were not going to be helpful moving forward.

The compromise you cannot make is often what leads to initiation. It says, “Will you stand by this? Will you bear the process of attrition? Will you find what’s true within and vow to protect it? Will you trust in the unknown enough to let it carry you into new ranges of belonging?” says Toko-pa Turner.

For months, I woke up feeling as though a part of my body was missing. I went to Malibu (and not for the experience of Andy Dick walking behind me on the beach, kicking a red rubber ball at my heels for that hour) but for the presence of the living land, those elements. I cried all over Malibu. I tried to move to Taos, New Mexico.

In the end, I returned to Maui. Grief was waves, like they say, but for long periods, I was way beneath the surface. It felt like I was living the wrong life most of the time. It hurt almost always.

I caught glimpses of what I was becoming, or how I was un-becoming. What I found was that these overwhelming seeming emotions simply exist. That’s the heart’s language. Distracting from them keeps them sticking around.

Now Andrew, my brother, is a living breathing force in my life. Part of the reason I had to come to Maui after he died is because this is a place on the planet where the veils between this world and his are thin enough to connect with him.

Beyond the veil, the ones we’ve known in life surround us. But we are not limited to their presence alone. A chorus line, a litany of ancestors champion us, take our burdens to offer into the sacred fire, and celebrate every small action we do or do not take to become free. Their love is so bright, and fierce, like the sun; like a tsunami that threatens to wash all of the fear and self doubt from our bones, a tidal wave of light.

They take our hands when we let them. We follow them into the vast space.