skeleton ghosts

Dear one

A turn of phrase ran across my field yesterday– “skeletons fell out of my closet”. This morning, in a completely unrelated, seemingly random reading (as I’ve mentioned here before, a friend and I are taking one chapter a week out of David Whyte’s alphabetically arranged exploration of everyday words, entitled Consolations), the word ‘Haunted’ was the title of the essay. Now, what do I think of that?

It seems my belief that, once healed (or believed to be so), certain life experiences can be laid lovingly to rest, never to be exhumed again, might have been false, or at least premature. Perhaps I mistakenly believed that to have certain memories revisit me meant that I would also to go back to the same feelings I once had about them. Feelings of loss, feelings of grief, feelings of regret, feelings of shame, feelings of being a victim, feelings of betrayal, feelings of abandonment, feelings of failure. So, despite the profound healing I believed I had done (and had indeed done); despite the deep acceptance, compassion, and love I had for myself; despite my felt sense of awed gratitude for the ways that I had been deepened and grown by those experiences; despite the feeling that all those parts of me had been fully integrated into my Being Love; despite my belief that we cannot live in the past, it seems that didn’t mean that we are not at times called to revisit.

There might just be something precious laid to rest with those bones. Some valuable bit of ourselves that we buried along with the pain. Perhaps something is still clinging to them– a striving to prove oneself worthy, the fear that is in bed with, and embedded within, that striving — which keeps us entangled in old patterns, not entirely free to allow ourselves to Be the Love that we are.

And although these particular ghosts were not summoned by me, but by another, it feels like grace, this invitation, to have given them an audience at this stage of my life, to welcome them home, perhaps, or to lay them more peacefully to rest this time. I hadn’t realized the invisible hold they still had on me. The feeling of release, however, since their visitation has been palpable. Though it felt similar in the middle of those dark nights of remembrance — the pain in my body, the heaviness of shame, the depths of despair — their emergence wasn’t at all for the purpose of dragging me into that dark but releasing them into the light.

The word forgiveness is rising in me now. I know how trite this will sound, because I know how it feels when it’s talked about before your arrival at this gate, but if I am going to move fully into this stage of life which is about Giving — whatever has been bestowed upon me to Giveaway through the course of this lifetime, whatever Grace or Compassion or Love or Wisdom — I’m guessing it must be freed For-Giving. Freed from fear, freed from need — need to be seen as good enough, need to be understood, need to be accepted or forgiven by anyone other than myself— freed from striving and performing and perfection . Perhaps a final forgiveness of self, one that these skeleton/ghosts can receive, at last, as authentic and true, know it deep in their bones, so to speak, is what is being asked of us when they rise, or fall, to revisit us one last time. For while we may have believed that we forgave them from our perspective, they may not have received it from theirs.

And we release them at last for Good. The relief is profound. Almost all of a sudden, a lightness is felt in body and spirit, as this part of us comes fully to rest. (or does it rise to take its honored place inside of our flesh?)

One day, perhaps you too will be asked to pick through the bones of your past life, with tenderness and compassion, to find the jewels amongst them– the way that your soul was at work, the ways you were grown, the ways that even there your authentic beauty and gifts were being expressed and refined– and to lay those bones to rest at last, expressing to them your deep gratitude for carrying you through to where you stand today, and forgiving them for all that they suffered.

And may you also find Grace in the passage.