divine love.

 

Dearest baby boy,

On the the occasion of your birth day, seven years ago I write this as a testament of the love you embody + have shown me. And as a reminder that you have everything you ever needed, just waiting to be found. Search deep within yourself when you are lost, and where you find love, you will find the Divine.

From where does one begin a story of creation, unravelling, and piecing back together? From whole to shattered to One. Is there a specific moment that ignites and puts healing into action. The truth for me, is yes. It was you. My son. The most generous gift I have ever been given. Your birth ignited in me a pain that I did not know was hurting and limiting my spirit, to the depths that I have uncovered since then.

You came into the world with all of the excitement and anticipation of any blessing to this magnitude, but your birth left me so far out of control, agonizing in pain, without you to hold. The sterile field saw you ripped away from me, and as my pupils dilated, I asked, “are you happy?” to your father, on another planet, I asked about earth, this is good right? we are happy?

But despite this obstetric violence, baby boy, you were perfect. You were so beautiful. You were so unbelievably small and chubby. Your cheeks, as they continue to persist, were the perfect consistency of plush and soft, that any girl has ever dreamed to snuggle. You were the most generous gift I had ever been given.  My sweetheart, you were the catalyst that set into motion a series of painful remembrances, and unravellings, the façade that had gently concealed these pains was broken and left exposed were the wounds.

My sweetheart.  For these seven years, I fought for us. I fought for myself. And I continue to fight for you, my world. There is no pain greater than my love for you. I believe, however generously naïve, that I shielded you, but the truth is, inside of your body, you hold with you the truth, and not the knowledge, as much as the awareness of how deep love can be.

Motherhood as it occurs as part of an inheritance, means that we do not exist outside of the context in which we are grown. Not bound, but carrying with us, histories and legacies that we inherit and must often contend with in our own journeys into becoming mothers. Within this complex landscape however, our knowledge of our selves remains limited to the bastardized existence we live in lands foreign to our spirits. We know ourselves in relation to a world in which we are not considered as fully human, and so we find ourselves lost, confused, and often disconnected from our whole-selves. Furthermore, we are not only limited in knowing ourselves, but we must also contend with the markings of generations of colonial, capitalist violence. And so, we continue to fight as we become mothers. We fight to know ourselves and to live in the fullness of our potential, in what we innately contain. In God’s image, with fullness of divine love + mercy. but it is hard. it is exhausting. it takes so much work. and sometimes we give in. and we often want to give up. but your love, nourishing and whole, feeds our spirit, and gently nudges us back onto the path.

True love, is for me, in this context about healing. A love with the power to transcend the limits of wordly life and to transport your spirit from the narrow confines of the finite to the divine, sacred, wholeness of the universe. I used to say that your birth gave me the greatest gift I had ever been given, the gift of my pain realized. But I am learning now, that this was just the beginning, because the true gift wasn’t the ways I was being broken. It was what the breaking made possible. The opening. To open oneself to divine mercy. The ultimate act of love. The truest, purest, most honest, vulnerable.

Indeed, my heart was broken, and I was searching to be made whole.

And this wholeness. It is made possible only by learning how to excavate the love you embody in your being. Not something external to you, not something you must gain,

or grow,

or get.

But a clearing, a cleansing, a purification of the heart, away from fear, sadness, guilt, and towards learning to love and trust your own heart as the guide. Beautifully taught to me as “what we refuse to accept, persists. but what we accept, we transcend” (Benoit, 2022). And love as a sacred practice, means too accepting that endings can also be the beginning.

Your love makes me whole. And in our love, I feel divine love and mercy. Beyond knowing, it is an awareness, it is a transcendent love, that is embodied, beyond the mind, and towards deepening consciousness. This awareness, overwhelming and blissful.

And learning to live with joy has been hard, it continues to test me, and yet, what feels the most uncomfortable is actual the most natural feeling we can have. This world meant to harden, distract, poison your heart, can be purified with the right intent, and submission to the will of the Most Loving. And so, as you fight to embody these principles of divine love and mercy, be gentle. It is about becoming, by retunring to ourselves, and allowing the fragmented pieces of our histories, selves and divine traits to become unified and whole once again.

My generous baby boy. I love you to a measure beyond this world. Beyond the limited knowing that we fight against. You are my greatest love and my biggest test wrapped into one. And what could that be other than divine love and mercy? The sacred unravelling of self and simultaneous creation of wholeness.  This love sits in the space where I end and you begin, my love, we sit together in this feeling of oneness with the grace and beauty of the Divine. My beloved. My love for you is this sacred connection to God, boundless, everlasting mercy. That breathe, a little too late, but just in time.

Love may then, not only be about others, but about opening oneself up and allowing yourself to feel the full joy of divine and sacred connection.

And so, be patient and gentle, everything in divine timing.

May Love be your guide.

And so, I ask for you consider the following questions, how can we conceptualize wholeness without gaining something outside of ourselves? How can excavation act as a powerful tool in sacred healing? Furthermore, what is divine timing? How can we follow a sacred rhythm outside of the limits of modern conceptions of ‘time’? How can Mercy fill the voids of guilt and shame we carry as mothers, doing our best and never enough? In what ways can this ultimately allow us to see motherhood as an active becoming of self in relation to sacred love, as nurturing and embodied practice?

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6 years and a million tears later.

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tasting mercy.