Crone

Picture by me, of my favorite Palestinian Old Crone. Tata

An old crone approached me,

When I was just 18 years old.

She told me she had a secret,

And asked if I wanted to know.

Most of my life has been a mystery

So of course I was curious.

She told me that my aura cuts off at my knees.

I looked at her puzzled; what does that even mean?

She went on to explain my lack of groundedness.

And how I needed to find a way to get rooted.

That my energy field doesn’t even extend below my feet. And it should go below the ground like a tree.

In many ways it was a personal koan. To figure out how an adopted person could root and ground themselves.

So I began with mind.

I went to yoga,

Deepened friendships,

Searched for my birth parents and family,

Spent money on books, oils, and sprays.

And when that didn’t work,

Used substances.

Had lots of Sex

And put myself in really dangerous places

I tried to distract myself, because now I felt it always. That “not groundedness.”

When I turned twenty five I had a top to bottom life redress.

I got sober, lost all of my friends, and decided to move overseas.

When I landed on foreign shores, lost in the wilderness of withdrawal, I saw her again.

That same hideous old crone. With naked ankles, and cackling laugh.

Dancing an impish jig

Under a tree with rotting apples at her feet.

Wonderment striped my face. It drew her lock arms with me.

“Silly girl, the idea of being “grounded” is a trap. You were only given one fractal of a whole body of wisdom.

Paradox

Groundedlessness is where you find your feet. When you stop gripping and grasping for the edges. When you allow yourself to tumble into the fertile blackness.

In that deep surrender, allowing yourself to be swallowed by the void, is where the ground effortlessly rises to meet you.

You will never find it by “trying”.

There is no way to effort yourself into feeling rooted.”

She hadn’t said a word. But that’s what she told me.

So I let it all go. I let myself be swallowed by the darkness, went down the rabbit hole.

Began a scavenger hunt of soul retrieval on Holy Land. I lived among the crones and took in their silent transmissions. There’s a deeper kind of understanding when language isn’t the medium. Learning through sense perception. Embodied.

This wasn’t my first mystical experience. But they had always been isolated. I didn’t fully grok what I was getting into when I agreed to travel. I didn’t realize that every moment I’d be breathing into an unknown future.

The entire six months was a massive training in the mystery of groundlessness. Initiation in the world that cannot be known.

I learned to communicate beyond the spoken word. To quietly observe. To live on the inside of my eyelids. To slow alll the way down. To touch, to taste to feel.

I didn’t realize how strong my drive to “know” to “solve” to “think” to “understand” was. I was conditioned to activate those drivers first thing in the morning.

I let go of searching for ground to support me. And instead learned how to make a bed in the deep unknown.

I don’t always stay here. Frequently, I begin at the top, struggling to maintain control.

Like the pain of birth, I’ve come to understand that clenching makes it unbearable. And I surrender earlier in the process. I let myself sink to the bottom, tumble into nothingness, when my body signals that it’s contracting once again.