Are we alone?

 

Running at night presents its own challenges. With friends it does not seem as scary. I have done plenty of training runs with partners. But never alone. Loop after loop the darkness called to me to find the answers that I sought with the multitude of questions. I cried at the heavens for making me feel abandoned. Why am I here in this world? What am I here to do or more who am I to be? Why had God forsaken me? Now you are probably wondering that it was easy for me to just stop this nonsense and go home and stop this pain. Yes it was in my hands to do so at anytime. But I wanted answers, that had not arrived in deep meditation.

 

And so I silently yelled at the heavens as I looked up at the starry night, swallowing my pride, my shames, my failures, my abandonments to myself, mixed with tears. The body just kept running like an automaton, the mind was lost with anguish and the heart sought the truth. The dark tea time of the soul is amply named. In the metaphorical sense, I was drinking out of a spilled cup for sure.

 

When all the angers, the furies and the doubts had finished their regurgitation there was silence. I just breathed into the night. I looked around. The surroundings had changed.There was the faint whisper of pre dawn. The light quotient had increased slightly. The trees were a little more shapely now. Thoughts like the clouds had passed and yet I was still standing ( or running). I felt something holding me. Gravity? It was warm. It was not heavy but snug like an embrace. I had felt so alone throughout the night that my bones felt naked, yet not any more. I was supported.

 

It was all around me. When I had reached the point of gratitude for all my thoughts and my past experiences, there was nothing but gratitude. And one more thing. GRACE. That was it. I was never alone, for grace was with me. It has never left. I had left it through a distracted mind. My heart was open and I could feel it just as one feels the hug from a loved one. It was real. I felt it because now the mind was silent.

 

It was my fall from grace, my fall due to pride and shame of failures that I had buried but lay dormant in my bones, my fat cells, as experiences in the water contained as cellular memory that was finally released during the exertion of the run. Fasting does this similarly. But grace is always with us, and more importantly ALWAYS catches us. Our separation from divinity is the cause of our human suffering which ur human heart feels and hurts, but the divine heart through intuition guides us home, back to the loving embrace of GRACE. We were not abandoned, but we abandoned it when chose to become distracted with the illusions of life. We identity with the “I” and become separate, but we were never alone.

 

The longer I ran, the more I let go of the identities of a teacher, healer, cardiologist, father, son, husband, friend, athlete and all the other masks I wear daily and have worn to hide myself from the world. So if all these masks, these personas were illusions playing roles in an illusionary universe, who was I? that was it. There is no “I”. There is only the One. Call it the universe, the Source, God, Goddess or whatever. It does not matter what it is called, as any name is just another word mask to keep it hidden from each of us. I felt the connection to all living things past, present and future in that one instant moment of Oneness without any of my identities that had been offered up to the alter of Grace. I felt ALL of life, like being a pulse in an infinite network of light, even though I was still in the dark of night. Funny how life is full of paradoxes.

 

I let myself feel all of it. I let my breath take in and let it all go. This body is the vehicle of experience of all things. It is through my eyes that I observe the universe looking back at itself as me with love and wonder. I was grace and grace was me. No separation. Only love. And in love there is no alone. The word “ I “ became the farce. For all was just awareness experiencing itself in this moment.

 

For those that think that I was hallucinating, I can assure you that came much later in my story and in mileage, near mile 80, and at this point I was still 30 miles in. I had a long ways to go, and the night was still pregnant with contemplations for me to learn.

 

…………………….

 

I love you