Here Comes the Son

I took two days off writing and now I feel all out of sorts. I feel like I haven’t caught up with myself. I know that is a weird concept but that is what writing is for me, a daily conversation with myself, while God overhears. Overhears more than eavesdrops…God doesn’t really have to be all that interested in what I am saying…but I know Sprit does hear me, it is evident in my daily life.

I spoke to my son last week for the first time in more than six weeks. It was an amazing conversation that was never before possible between the two of us. He has grown and changed, I have grown and changed. It enabled us to meet each other on a new level where we both can feel bathed in the love, instead of all the problems.

He is reading books, meditating and writing. This is a fucking miracle. Truly. It feels like my son’s spirit and body became disconnected from each other and he was more like a person walking the earth with a balloon for a head. Only a flimsy string attached between his head and heart. No wonder he had such trouble, very hard for information to travel back and forth on a string…

It feels like now he is inhabiting himself. Like he actually lives in his body, his spirit well encased instead of being held like some sort of prisoner. It is nothing short of miraculous. And I have gotten a ring side seat for the greatest show on earth, someone (in this case my son) waking up.

As a practicing Buddhist, I am always in tune with waking up. People waking up from their suffering (mostly of their own making) and seeing that this life is here to help us work out ourselves. We are given all we need to wake up to see life as a vehicle to connect with spirit, to be mindful of ourselves, to hold good countenance, and then to help others. That is all. We get it very mixed up and confused. But the path is always and forever simple, trust God (or whatever you want to call Spirit), clean house (in my vernacular — unfuck yourself) and help others to do the same. That is it. That is all. That is the purpose of life.

I have watched my son flail. I have watched him ruin his life and his relationships. I have watched him be lonely and afraid while insisting he is not. I have watched him blame me. I have watched him blame many. It has broken my heart a lot. It is very hard to watch someone you love desperately make the same mistake over and over again.

As I prepare to go retrieve him from the wilds of Alaska, I find myself excited with only a tiny tinge of fear. He is different, it isn’t an act. You cannot act your way through paddling 14 miles a day in a canoe for two months. You cannot act your way through having to sit with yourself while you sit in a vow of silence. You cannot fake Alaska. I know, I have been there. Life is dangerously beautiful in Alaska, showing you daily that there is a very fine margin for error. You only get one mistake, because the second one is usually fatal.

So I am going to see my son whom I have never met before. I will bring with me, a me that he has never met before. Two strangers with a very intertwined past who now stand before each other with a freshness that has replaced the staleness of our dysfunction. I can’t wait to meet the new him and know that he will enjoy more (even if he can’t admit it) the new version of his mother that stands before him.

I can’t wait to hug him tight and tell him how much I love him, how proud I am of him and how very much I have missed him. Sometimes in this life while you are trusting God, cleaning house and helping others you are required to walk through some incredibly painful things. Sometimes you have to take action that feels like it might kill you in order to survive Tuesdays. Sometimes you find yourself so lost, you are found.

As his program grows to a close, so does my boy. So does this man child that I have the privilege to love, cherish and care for. I am so grateful for this kid. You can’t just love the easy ones to quote Glen Phillips. You have to love the ones in your life and on your path. And sometimes those people we love, are very, very hard to love mostly because they won’t let you love them. I have done my best but now I know I can do better by him. I have done my own inner work to ensure that I am different too. I have done the heart work, the hard work that will allow me to show up and be someone new for him. And love him as he is, in this new manifested form.

Here comes the son, the one that I have known the entirety of his life, but whom I have never met before. And oh, little darling, it seems like years since we’ve been here…