WHAT I NEED TO TELL YOU
by Meggan Watterson
Ultimately what I need to tell you can’t be told. Not with words anyway. Words are the ego’s favorite outfits.
Ultimately, what I need to tell you already lives inside you. It’s a diamond, a well. It’s a vat of honey that has no better name except home. And it calls to you when you are lonely, when you feel lost, when the sound of your name doesn’t comfort you. When you feel confused about why you’re here, or why you keep making the same choices again and again.
It’s there waiting, this knowing, this love that is love that is love. It’s the most radical existence because it’s not dependent on anything external to you.
It’s what gleams and glimmers in your eyes even when you feel defeated, betrayed, filled to the gills with the word failure. It’s there even when you feel like you’re drowning in the overwhelm, the regret, the shame your ego is flooding you with – you catch this light in your eyes, and you know in that place that’s beyond them, that place where words no longer have meaning, you know that everything is going to be all right. Not because it is, but because there’s nothing that exists outside of you that this love within you cannot meet.
This is where I am. It’s a world within a world. It’s a universe that’s merciful. It’s a heaven that has always been right here. It’s a love that never ends. It’s a divinity that’s realized. No longer distant and incomplete. But here in the tiny, discrete moments of the most courageous acts of being present, of finally entering the story of our own lives so fully, we move it forward; we experience what’s next, what’s new, what’s truer for us than what’s past.
My son and I have this prayer we recite before he gets out of the car and goes to school. It’s actually half prayer, half handshake. It’s a spiritual version of the pinkie swear. We loop our pinkies and say a quick prayer about love being with him. I made it up one morning in elementary school years ago when he was more anxious than usual. Over the years, we’ve kept up the practice, though now that he’s a teenager, we have to recite it at least a red-light or two away from his high school so no one sees.
Ultimately what I need to tell you is told like that – with our pinkies looped. Because life is hard. Change is difficult and inevitable. And because we forget so often that we’ve never been alone, even when we’re by ourselves. And this practice of “being with” – this is how everything changes. This is how I understand what Bells Hooks might have meant when she gave us this diamond – “healing is an act of communion.”
With only more love,
M.