Welcome,
This is Pawn McGorden and I want to share with you something I wrote a while ago.
The call home,
Embracing everything.
Being alive is such a privilege,
This becomes clearer to me every day.
A while ago,
I was at Muir Beach in Northern California with my daughter and a dear friend of mine from New York.
We went in the early evening,
As the sun was setting,
When the light was simply exquisite and the ocean shimmered gold and orange.
It was the perfect temperature,
Still warm but not too hot.
Amy was pregnant with her first baby,
Her belly beginning to blossom with fullness,
And she asked me to take some photos of her.
We began taking pictures at the far end of the beach by the jagged rocks,
The clear blue sky and the glistening ocean behind her.
She stood in silhouette,
Picturesque and round.
We were fully dressed since we were not planning to swim and we got so involved in doing the photoshoot that before we knew it,
We had been devoured by Mother Ocean.
She gobbled us up and all three of us were laughing,
Playing and getting totally soaked.
Our wet clothes stuck to our bodies.
My eight-year-old daughter Mira dove all the way in,
Squealing with glee and delight.
It was one of those incredible moments where our bodies were tingling,
The sun shining and waves were crashing as the tide slowly came in.
We were three humans,
Dancing,
Jumping,
Shouting and giggling.
We had merged with the cold,
Foamy ocean water.
There was an instant where we all looked at one another in celebration and shouted,
Yay,
We're alive,
This life is sacred.
Thank you,
Thank you,
Thank you.
It was a moment of recognition where we were simply and utterly alive.
It was precious,
Heart-opening fun,
Nourishing,
True nourishment.
We had been ravished by the Pacific Ocean,
Embraced by her primordial depths.
And as we watched the sun go down behind the cliffs,
We all knew we shared something special,
An intimate connection with nature.
There are those moments when you know you are lucky to have been born,
Where you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can trust life.
And this was one of them.
The next day,
I had an experience that radically contrasted this moment of delighting in the aliveness of being and yet was equally potent.
I had the honor of meeting with a client in my counseling practice who has been battling leukemia for the past two years.
She is walking on the razor's edge between life and death.
Straddling the line between life and death is powerful.
It is a moment of being tested,
Being invited to embrace everything,
Everything that is arising.
My wonderful client is housebound with little energy to do much of anything and often is in a lot of physical pain.
The simple actions that we take when our bodies are strong to assist us in returning to health were not working.
Her body deeply depleted.
She no longer spends her days frolicking on Muir beach as the sun sets.
Her heart is beckoning her to dive into a more internal experience of being alive.
I witness her with awe as she willingly moves into a new alignment,
A new agreement with her body and soul.
She breathes deeply,
Feeling all there is to feel and she opens to what is now being asked of her.
Her once resilient spirit is now stretched thin like a well worn scarf and I can feel her exhaustion after two long years of facing the challenges associated with this devastating illness.
Now what is being asked of her is to trust,
Trust and surrender to the truth of what is.
As she gently turns toward the end of her life,
The invitation is to find peace amidst the pain of letting go of all she holds dear.
As I held the space for her to be with all of this,
It was clear that we were treading on sacred ground.
We were walking in the terrain of the heart.
The heart has many ways of calling us home,
Of bringing us into the poignancy of being alive from moments of oceanic rapture to life threatening illness.
What I know to be true is that both are sacred,
Both are equal and both invite us into a palpable sense of what it means to be present,
Human and fully alive.
Both call us home.
Thank you for your attention.
Please feel welcome to sit quietly,
Close your eyes and drop in to what it is that is calling you home.
So may blessings.
