Rejoining the Selves

You Are the Light

You are the light. I’ve seen it, stepped into its presence in my mind, and I recognize it immediately. I think I may have arrived at a destination that I have been searching for—that I believe might definitively exist.

Some months earlier, I go back through decades of memories and emotions guided by a voice, warm
and safe, that has accompanied me here before. She is aware of the undercurrents that run deeply
through my psyche, and she understands the layers—the skins that have been peeled off like those
covering onions at once fragile and protective–snugly attached. Just when you think you’ve extracted the last one, you find another layer more closely fitted to the form underneath it.

But the voice reassures me, asks me to go into room after room of my lived past and describe the details
as I search for my young Self. There are tight spaces and drab colors and corners where I find myself
tucked into myself protecting my heart and my head from flying emotional debris. Sheltering myself from the swirling chaos.

I’m just a small girl, and yet I’m seen as wise. I have knowledge without the experience to explain it, yes. I speak up and out where others cannot, and I assert my independence. But I don’t want to do their bidding. I’m just a girl and, though perceptive and reflective, even more so I’m longing to be held and reassured that I will always be safe and adored.

And in these already dreary rooms there are doors that the voice tells me to open and darkness I must
walk through. The rooms are murky and damp, and I have to pat the walls with my hands in a bit of a
panic to find my way around. I can’t imagine how going back there can help me, but then I stumble, and the dankness transforms into an earthy smell. I realize there are roots here beneath my feet and insight and understanding. It is in the darkness that things begin to grow.

For three days, I come back to the voice who wraps me in a promise of re-membering and gently guides
me down, down, down into the past and the darkness and then back up into the light. And now I find my little being sitting in rooms with big windows surrounded by plants and books and creative supplies. She is full of curiosity and contentment.

With my older wiser self as a witness and the voice once again gently leading me, my adult self picks up my small little baby self and presses flesh to flesh, warming and soothing her. My adult self tells the young child who has been raising loud and uncomfortable dissonance in my hips and my chest and my throat that she is no longer responsible for protecting us. She does not need to spend her time setting off alarm bells every few minutes as she notices every minute shift of mood and energy and tone in the environment around her. I can take care of us now. One piece of myself melds into the other piece and they join with the third, and past, present and future become one.

Before I leave, I am greeted by this large, warm, soft light that reaches above my head and encircles me in a kind of embrace. I believe this is my destiny to encounter this light and to recognize when I am in its presence out in the world. All of this work…all of this time and this faith and I just know I will find my way.

And then I meet you and I recognize you immediately. You are warm and generous and not ordinary and full of light. It is not a light generated by electricity nor is it sharp or flashy. Instead, it is this soft glowing kind of light that fills you all the way up and then spills out of you. You, the light, then find your way to me and, gradually, I allow you to fill and then spill out of me. This light is expansive and natural, and it seems inevitable.

But then, first in little hairline cracks and soon in a spider web of fractures, the light becomes jagged. I
try to scoop it up and hold it between us and remind you of how it shimmered not so long ago.
Every time I move to return the warmth to you…when I attempt to mix some of my own luminosity with yours, you back away just a bit. Though you have freely wrapped your own light around me, you cannot seem to accept very much in return. I have seen your light and now I cannot understand your pain.

The panic of the small girl who was abandoned again and again when all she wanted was to be held and reassured reacts with what starts as a quiet complaint and then swells into a full body howl. Your wounds have opened my wounds again, and I become the assertive child who, when her demands are not met, must take action to protect. And then the light dissipates and is gone.

What if, I find myself questioning, rather than panic when I perceived the change in the quality of light, what if I could have remembered to hold that little girl, flesh to my flesh, and quieted her so that we could look out together and see that your withdrawal was your pain and your own primal prompting to protect? What if I could have sat with your pain and my own and trusted that the discomfort it inevitably brought–accepted that it would eventually move on? And what if that light that I saw, the light that I so quickly recognized? What if that light that I saw was really just me all along?

And so, here I am again, after so much effort, sitting in solitude and learning, finally, to trust that my
own inner light will never leave me alone in the dark. I send out wishes to the Universe that you will
somehow come to know how bright you are, because I wasn’t wrong. I did see your shimmering
luminous being even if you hadn’t yet.

As sad as it still sometimes is, I now accept that your light was never mine to keep. It was intended to be a mirror of my own glowing self. It was a promise that there is still a chance to find someone out in the world who fully owns this quality of light. But, more importantly, I now understand that no one but me can hold my own light, and I begin to accept that there is no final destination. And so, again, I seek to grow into a closer approximation of the partner I search for, always knowing that I, myself, am the very best company I will ever keep.