The Sky Is Crying: When Eras End

February 2013

Goa, India

I awaken to the sweet sound of songbirds chirping in the coconut trees outside my hut, mixed in with the lapping of waves and crows talking to each other. I’m overcome with a sense of bitter-sweetness. I’m both happy and sad.

It’s happy-sad time. The end of an era. I am finally admitting to myself, filled with this happy-sadness, that I’m going through a death process. Grief is hitting me hard here in India, even while back home (yes, I am finally referring to the U.S. as “home” again, for now) the new visions and renewed relations are so nourishing and inviting.

I’m in a year of transition. According to numerology, my Tarot card for 2013 is The Hanged Man. It’s about a complete change in perspective, and surrendering completely. Letting go of that which we held dear for so very long, with faith that Life Itself is bringing a new chapter in.

Things will never, ever be the same for me again. The last twelve years were beyond the beyond for me, as I was spiritually COOKING. Melting down in a crucible called India. That chapter has ended, the cooking completed within the crucible of transformation as my two great gurus – Mother India and my spiritual teacher – were the keepers of the forge.

The last three years encompassed the slow ‘n steady turning of the Great Wheel of Life. This is the long reentry back to a more western-centric existence. But even if I know the turn of events is inevitable, my soul is still playing catch-up, or come-down, as it were, and the sky is crying over it.

Literally. It is raining off and on, unseasonably, here in Goa. The rains mirror my grief, a washing of the soul to make way for something new. Sitting here in my beach hut in south Goa, tears fill my eyes and my heart seizes.

India is one of my soul mates – imagine! An entire nation! She will always hold a seat of honor in my soul. But my relationship with Her IS changing. She has to step down from being priority #1 – “The One” – in order to make way for new loves and horizons to emerge in my life.

Attempting to feel that old magic is futile. When we have moved on from a life chapter, we’ve moved on. Like I said, this turning of the wheel, this time of “closure” has lasted three years. Death can take a long time. As I feel a sense of an old identity dying, I’m acutely aware that grief is an honest emotion. It is so pure. It is critical in its place of creating space for the next chapter. But it need not turn into mourning which is an emotional identification with the past, an unnecessary clinging to “the way we were.”

Indeed, I could drop into reverie now of ‘the way things were’ all those years ago when I first touched down in Delhi twelve years ago, but those blogs have been written in real time and they’ve been compiled into books. I could bitch and moan no end about the changes here in India and how it’s just not the same – the skyrocketing prices, the disrespect to customs that make for real eyesores, the love/hate of technology showing up – mobile phones, Internet, and satellite television. And the newly emerging sense of consumption that India is inheriting  from the West as it strives to speed up its status on the developing nation stage.

Perhaps I will write more on these things. But for now, just for today, The Sky Is Crying*.

I am so glad I recognize grief. It’s one of the gifts of time, and getting older. Yes, the gifts. When we feel it fully, we know we’re ending a life chapter. And, while we’re not fully stepped into the next flow, we can trust through wisdom that Something New will emerge.

 

My first Big Grief was divorce at 28, representing end of youth. The second Big Grief was death of my guru at 38, a transition into becoming my own spiritual master. And now, here is my third Big Grief, the ending of a long-term, all-encompassing love affair with a nation.

 

This particular 5-week trip is about honoring the work I’ve done here over the years. It’s also about severing the ties. Making sure no stone has been left unturned before I part ways. The power of new love, new ventures, new vistas back in the U.S. holds promise. I am excited to get going on my second book (the Bindi Girl sequel) and other projects and collaborations with others. But the grieving process is a primarily solo, internal one. It does feel vacuous, it is exhausting, and the whole point is that it can’t really be assuaged. Perhaps, if it could be lessened, it would mean that it wasn’t really over. And it is.

 

It can feel like you’re abandoning your lover, or that she is abandoning you. The scythe hurts. Even if no one has done the abandoning – it’s just happened as a part of natural life cycles – the leaving, the ending happened on its own through no intention or fault.  But the ending process MUST be completely experienced. There IS a period at the end of the last sentence of a life chapter.

 

Let us not forget: real love never dies. The story ends, but not the love, nor the gratitude. No matter the external changes in circumstances, in loyalties, in the love we shared with a person, a place, a time of life – the love will endure. It is a flower in the heart. The tears water the new seeds of growth which shall bear  springtime blossoms. We are rich. And it is beautiful.

*THE SKY IS CRYING

Can’t you see the tears roll down the street?

~ Blues standard (Elmore James)