Day 11: Wasted

Jay Berghuis
Sep 9, 2024
3 min read

Updated: Sep 19, 2024

God, I don’t know what to do with this love that I’ve tasted.

Tryin’ to do what I can, tryin’ to be who I am,

and I’m wasted.

So it seems there’s no escape,

we are part beauty and part heartbreak.

… I can’t figure it out

… help me hold it all.

Red Molly’s song fills my room at 6:00 AM.

It’s still dark and I pour my cup of extra-strong Typhoo tea with gratitude. And, I feel utterly wasted. Even after a good sleep, it takes a gut-load of determined chi to get out of bed and face the day ahead. As the tears pour down, I pray into the heavens:

"This is hard work, this is way too much hard work for a 75-year-old woman to find my way with two broken legs. Please help me. Help me find joy – my song of joy.”

As ‘Red Molly’ sings this song, I slowly sob my way to hold this excruciating paradox. I CAN hold it ALL – because of you my community, because of the sun streaks in the dark sky, because of this fired-up connection of care. These last 10 days have been the most excruciating of my life at a physical level. I’ve always depended on my body to function; to move, to serve every whim, every need that I had. Kind witnesses yesterday offered me the words ‘indomitable’, ‘dauntless’, ‘a force of nature’ to describe me.

While I know it’s true that I have been blessed with a heart of courage, what really matters today is to tap into my deepest, often hidden resource of extreme Love. I know that super-capacity is here, I’ve tasted it now and will always be hungry for more. Exploding in and through me, for me, in this experience. And, I am receiving Love through you, seen and unseen, re-‘membered’, through Spirit alive in relationship as we live from our hearts, embodied as nature-beings.

Cosmic arms come to me in this moment in the form of a nurse log.

A nurse log is an elder tree that serves as the growing site for young plants.

A fallen tree becomes a womb of life.

Yes – this is all about being held in this space and time through community. We cannot do this alone. Friends, I will not be able to walk and adventure on this earth again without a multitude of arms reaching out, (including my clever gizmo – a metal ‘reacher’ arm which just picked up my glasses which had leaped to the floor – ha!).

Yesterday, I struggled with crutches for the first time; falling backwards and then forwards into the arms of the physical therapist. My right foot knows that she’s also broken. She knows she’s not confident with the full weight of my body – yet. I still need to figure out how to use a crutch for support to master the heavy-duty stairs to our apartment and my office-nest. Yesterday for the first time Uli picked me up and lifted me into the back seat of the car. So tender. Phew - our Honda Fit is just big enough for my leg ‘to fit,’ with the wheelchair crunched in the back.

What would I do without all these arms and hearts of love?

Not just physically, but spiritually and emotionally. I could go on, but I won’t bore you with gory details. Maybe you’ve experienced this and I can inspire you to remember your deep learnings of being both helpless and powerful and completely entwined with all that we need in the Great Community of Life. Both. And. Let’s not go back to sleep! This is always our reality as humans. I am experiencing this dimension physically for the first time in every cell of my body.

Friends, you’ve heard me say it over the decades, that I am called to build community. That our life as a couple is to inspire and dream new forms of spiritual community into being. The words haven’t changed, yet now I know them deep in my bones. I need you. You need me. Interdependence, without soul-sucking dependency. Each of us doing and being only what we are called to on this planet, and asking, seeking, dreaming, reaching out for help in everything else! Knowing that only in the Greater Community of Being with our more-than-human-creation that Cosmic Love becomes our Sustainer. Our power and energetic life force, linked to those that came before and those that come after us.