Learning To Dance With Death
“He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.”
I’ve been learning to dance with the lady in the long black dress. Her deep brown eyes pierce me with endless knowing. She hides nothing, yet can’t fully be seen. Unfolding bit by bit, an infinitely mirrored mystery.
But when She looks at me, I’m raw and exposed.
There’s nothing I’ve
thought,
been,
done,
that She doesn’t know.
And it breaks me.
Down.
I’m down on my knees, again. Tears running rampant in my parched Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Death.
That is Her name.
And Grief.
Regret and Shame. No, not Her. They lurk around. Waiting to catch me as I’m falling down, to tell me everything without external sound.
The choice is always there, between the two. Death that leads to death or the one that leads to truth.
And, Truth sets us free. The Bible tells me so…
Freedom feels like a prison in this panoramic desert glow.
Strange thoughts overtake me, like the pleasure of pressing my raw ache into the needles of a cactus so I can feel the pain I won’t.
Dehydration
Depravation
Desolation
They’re enough to make you mad.
But if you don’t let them, you’re worse off than if you had.
This madness is the kind that strips you naked in your narrowed view.
Throwing everything wide open into its originary hue.
No longer distorted.
Plain in sight.
Your actions all reveal you,
There’s nowhere left to hide.
My initial descent into the desert came with a swift fatal blow.
One I admittedly presuppositioned.
Summoned to initiate this desiccated inquisition.
Before She came to see me, I was lost in my little story. One of being “hurt” and “cheated,” “a fool,” “unwanted.” How pathetic and boring - absurdly absudity.
A greater fool was I, and I was about to be found out.
She came as I was mouthing my self pitiful lyrics. If you listened carefully enough, you’d hear even the broken-stringed instrument. They went something like this:
Dusting off
I’d hit the ground
Fell from Heaven
All the way down
To earth’s shriveled groundI sit on dry desert
Beside my fallen crownKissed by razored lips
Maimed by life’s brutal blow
Alone
Forgotten
Unknowably unknownI stand up to try to see
Only wasteland surrounding me
No water, no tree“It can’t be true,” I mutter through.
The love I believed for and chose in you.
The heat stirs up a foreign rage.
But I’m free now,
No longer caged.
What do I do with freedom here?
Aren’t I:
NO ONE
NOTHING
in NOWHERE
What hope is there in a place like this?
For a fool like me.
This isn’t a fairy tale ending.
There’s no white dress or white horse.
No happy ending, no bliss.
A snake slithers across the sand.
I cry out to this nothingness, everythingness: God’s Creation,
and it echos back:
Show me thy ways
Take my hand
If you show me how,
I’ll rise again.
She appears now, across the sand,
Her long black dress hides Her form, but not Her hands.
She is a woman, unforlorn.
I feel her vibrations through the ground
She is unmistakable now.
Beyond human incarnation,
She's
Eternal Timeless
Infinite Vastness
Midnight’s Abyss
Her name rolls off my tongue,
I AM ISIS.
No sooner did I say Her name,
Than the flood of memories one by one came. And, I felt ashamed.
But not in shame, really, for,
I AM in GRIEF.
And She’s in me -
A brokenhearted undoing of the poor little me.
I saw everything I couldn’t see,
When my eyes were focused so narrowly.
This wide-eyed illumination,
Retold the entire story’s narration.
Beautifully quenched in a liquid-love oasis,
A visceral contemplation, removed me from my brittle stasis.
Flashes upon flashes in memories.
All the things, I didn’t see.
And each by each,
I lowered my face.
Humility, the underside of Grace.
Sweet like honey
Rich like milk
Mingled with tears
Went down like silk.
Destroying my appetite,
For anything
For all.
When your eyes open like this,
you feel quite small.
You realize how insignificant all the significances were. You see you lost sight of what mattered, like pressing your face into a wall, you can’t see the ALL, at all.
But zoomed out, in this sudden way,
All that was - is on display,
You gnash your teeth and wail away.
This is the part they didn’t say:
No one will save you from the Truth that sets you free.
From Its sheering revelation,
From the dust beneath your knees.
The Truth sets you free, the Bible says.
Sometimes it’s not with pleasure, but rather by Her whip.
Whiplash against a stiffened neck.
Out of nowhere, unbeknownst to you.
But what if this is the upside of Truth?
A doubled-edged sword,
Revealing the motive, the joint, the binding cord.
Fractures into which the gold is poured.
I open,
I yield,
I take it in.
Grace upon Grace,
For sin upon sin.
My humble ask:
Lord,
Let me live as Love yet again.
Amen.
She is pleased
I am, too.
And suddenly, I’m here writing this in my 10x10 room.
“When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption…”
My Confession
If you’re not familiar, my style is weird, layered, subtext.
This is a poem I wrote after my eyes finally softened into focus, and all my armor fell, and I did, too. The deep angst of sudden humility stripped me until all that was left was Love, the kind that hurts so beautiful to heal blind ugly.
My Confession:
I really f*cked up. And yet, I couldn’t have done otherwise.
Shall we dance in the trance?
I started off on the wrong foot,
the wrong premise,
the wrong method of madness.
Lost sight of my magic,
the only thing that made me exceptional,
irresistibly wonderful,
stunningly indescribable.
I traded it for the lie:
The lie of Eve.
Helping when I wasn’t born to “help.”
But to dangle a leg from my skirt.
To shimmer and glisten in the sun.
To be the divine scent of roses.
The singsong of a bird.
Kaleidoscopic radiance of the sun setting down.
To be the teasing dance of clothes on and off skin.
The warmth of holding, and caress flesh to flesh.
The wetness of tongue, softness of lips.
The invitation of bliss,
Through the portal of bosom into thee,
unknown,
Where God dances, seduces and winks.
Alluring you to enter the mystery that cannot be known without experience.
I long for my lover,
To show him what I know now.
What I learned in the desert,
When I made that parched vow.
I had to go alone to retrieve Mayim Hayim,
the elixir of life,
But I did.
And I’m here now.
If you’ve retrieved yours, come for me.
If you too made the desert vow, run with me.
Over the hills of separation, to merge as one,
Making bliss-f*ck-love both bedrock and pinnacle.
Where our dark and light explode, and God is born.
I know now what I couldn’t have then.
I am Other. Perfect Other.
Everything and Nothing.
Innocence, sin.
Complete.
Empty.
Full.
I AM.
The Truth Is:
The full spectrum of Heaven and Hell live in me.
I am everything you hoped and everything you hated.
Yet this is my confidence:
I am consecrated to Love.
P.S. I want to help now.
Not to keep you as before,
Selfishly sedating my attachment fears,
But to tend and keep the walled garden,
Paradise.
For everywhere my river goes, life abundant flows.
I didn’t know I was a volcano.
The dust has finally settled and left a bit of grit in my teeth to remind me.
Hi. If we haven’t met, I’m Colette.
I should I set a signpost here:
“Welcome to Alice’s tunnel into wonderland.” Bizarre objects will float up as you fall. I encourage you to eat the yummy ones.
It’s 3/1/25. 9ish am EST. Playa Del Carmen, 🇲🇽
I’m currently poolside, attempting to share something with you (it’s been a few years).
So here goes…
I met a gorgeous soul at the pool yesterday.
We shared a moment.
“I’m here because of a break up,” she said through her bronzed sunglasses. I could just make out her tender eyes, and her long lashes.
“It’s like I was left at the altar and this is my solo honeymoon trip.”
I could relate to those words - more than she knew.
“I just had a break up, too.” (This is my birthday solo trip.)
She’d come with a male friend (a friend friend) to shake the sadness. It wasn’t exactly working, not in the way a woman is really asking for.
“You did!?” She lit up. She felt instantly seen, known, understood - it’s all she’s ever wanted. So she showed me more, and I loved it, “I’ve cried every morning over breakfast.”
Earlier, I had been crying, too.
Salty sweet tears of humility and liberation.
The ocean is just beyond me as I’m writing this. The sun is already pressing beads of sweat to express from beneath my breasts.
I feel my body. Ugh - she yearns for places that press against her in heat and simultaneously offer instant (on demand) relief via cool, cleansing waters.
The contrast is cathartic - the intense sun presses in on me, beads of sweat slide down my abdomen and pool.
I gaze into the lip of my belly button. The cord has been cut now. I remind myself.
Glistening blue waters beckon me to cool off at any moment.
The Universe is a seductress, a flirt of magnitude, and she’s brilliant at it. She knows me, that I get wet for such ready service.
“I just love how service oriented they are here.” I tell my ex (my other one). “I am at your service, the taxi driver and the Airbnb host tell me.
Oh, She knows the way to my animal.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s them - it’s not them…it’s the River - She calls me. If you know the River, you’re reading beyond my words.
Ooh, that turns me on - being seen, being heard, being known.
My ex does, too. The same other one. (Knows how much I enjoy service, silly.)
“Not yet” I tell the undulating pool, lapping the edge with her tongue. “Let me get a little hotter.”
I need to reach the point where I can’t take it anymore. I’m not quite there yet, but when I am, I’ll enter her and receive her fully.
“Soon my darling,” I acknowledge her invitation. (You should always acknowledge her invitation or she’ll leave you with yourself, all locked up with your own boring thoughts.)
Soon, I’ll receive her as she drenches me in her waters, washing away the memory of the heat, its edging pain.
Until I’m ready for more - pain - that is.
Pain and pleasure spin me around; dance me deep into the darkened ground. Thrust me up when the blackness pervades; tempt me when light’s insistence offers no relieving shade.
Contrast.
Intense contrast.
I’ve always loved it, craved it, needed it to fuck my cells into ecstasy and rapture or explode my bounds into infinite space - that feeling that has always felt like God to me.
“I need it like people need the razor’s edge.” I told my sweet friend. (She doesn’t know it yet, but she’ll be my maid of honour one day. A nod to her British.)
Aww, isn’t that cute, Hope is here now, too. I have a bit of a chemical romance of love-hate with the Hope fairy, but that’s for another time.
I’ve just awakened to the pattern I’ve had of seeking after intensity. It rapidly revealed itself, as if my life (all 42 years) had presented themselves to me like little marching soldiers all in a row, all in order, all making sense.
“I think I’ve been seeing this intensity that takes me beyond the edge of what I’ve known through experience, external or internal, as love, as God, as coming alive.”
And I crave that fresh rush feeling. Don’t you?
“I think I think intensity is love…like I interlaced them together somehow, but this kind has its pendulum swing, and there’s always a big drop off.”
Enter the breakup.
“He just kicked me over the cliff, tossed me out like I didn’t matter. And two days - only two days - after he said he was in love with me, loved me from the beginning…”
Ooo. Enter the intensity.
I needed it - this time, not like the drug of the past. I needed it to be harder - hard enough to kick some sense into me.
And I finally did. (Spoiler alert - we are always the spirit of love behind our projected antagonist trying to get ourself to see something; look open hearted enough and you’ll see it.)
I think I’ve been seeking the intensity because it somehow meant I was really loved, really desired, that I really mattered and here’s the linchpin - to someone.
But, the pendulum will swing all the way to attention starvation. I’m gonna die from dehydration - dry AF like the Sahara desert. It meant: I wasn’t, I didn’t.
Enter my chemical romance.
Suddenly seeing myself is what made me cry, and realizing why I couldn’t actually ever feel that BIG RADICAL LOVE I’d always wanted. It was ALL I ever really wanted.
“I love big and radical and all the way…why can’t I find someone like me?” (More on why that actually doesn’t work later. It does and it doesn’t. Everything is what it is and it’s also its opposite. See we’re falling now. Stay with me.)
Now - there is someone who loves me like that…and it’s fascinating because I don’t desire him. He doesn’t edge me. You know?
“You should just find someone boring, boring and stable. He may not be exciting, but he will be consistent and he will take good care of you and never leave.” (Advice I internally cringed at from my co-worker. She was both right and wrong.)
My chemical addiction comes online at this advice - visceral and dramatic - so like her.
“But boring is so…Boring! I’ll die!” (Picture her coughing from dehydration on the sand, lifting up a weak hand while mouthing a perfected “help”.)
It literally feels like I’ll die, and it would be a death in some physiological way. My cells so love to be fucked open by that rush.
Have you heard the song “God Needs The Devil”?
Read these lyrics:
I need you like God needs the Devil, honey
Someday soon, this dust's gonna settle
Come real quick and get inside my mind
'Cause when I'm all fucked up, I don't feel no pain
Won't you run to me, run through my veins?
Baby, won't you come and get me high?
Boring doesn’t do that.
“I think my nervous system has been aiming at the wrong thing this whole time. Like it’s really been seeking love thinking it was in the big, bold, all consuming expressions - whether God’s, Life’s or a man’s.” I continue. My friend continues to listen attendingly, spaciously and to the me beyond my words.
1 Kings 19:11-12 -
11 Then He said, “Go out, and stand on the mountain before the Lord.” And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.”