more dispatches from Ramadan
Day Sixteen
Letting go has always been so difficult for me. Years ago I came across this quote on social media that’s attributed to the Buddha, but it’s apparently fake and not a real Buddha quote. I only found that out while writing this and googling the quote and reading many articles about it. Yet another thing to let go. However, the quote still stands with me--
“in the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.”
--- people say is the Buddha, but actually, heartbreakingly, is not
Today, I find myself in a spiral where I feel myself in deep regret over the things that I clung so hard too, the ways that I stayed in relationships or friendships and hoped that people would change for me when I expressed my hurt, that they would feel so overcome with guilt that they would change their ways. And how much better my life would have been if I had just taken that energy and poured it into focusing on myself, to carving out the life that I wanted to live, to even recognizing my worth. Suddenly and surprisingly, I find myself in deep mourning of this, of the years and moments wasted pining for people who were okay with treating me badly.
I feel it for a long moment—the ease of letting go. Even if it’s brief, I’m overcome by gratitude towards the feeling. Of really embodying and recognizing that relationships don’t define your worth, and how other people see or perceive you is not a reflection of who you are. But just being able to be in your own energy, understanding that people’s presence in your life is a gift—as is your presence in theirs—and how beautiful it is to thank them and yourself for that presence while continuing to move forward and on with your own life, in the ways that work the best for you.
Day Seventeen
Today, while working with an elder, she teaches me how to conduct a forgiveness ceremony. A beautiful ritual to forgive myself and others. When she asks me to reach for an event that wants to be forgiven, I’m surprised by the one that comes up, what my subconscious is asking to forgive.
It was an event that was very traumatic for me, in which I was extremely violated and hurt, that was elongated not only by the trauma of the event but by people around me adding to that trauma over and over, the constant re-traumatization and opening of the wound of that event. What then had just been the original act of trauma multiplied and multiplied into dozens of acts of trauma, a many-thorned plant. And all the while I kept explaining the way people were hurting me over and over again, listen and empathize with their excuses, and put my own needs on the backburner because I internalized the voices of what people said that I should do instead of listening to myself.
The garden where I plant my forgiveness is soothing, magical, unwavering in its beauty. I water my plants and feel at ease, feel the wind on my skin. When I come back from my ceremony, the elder tells me it’s important to ending the cycle of re-traumatization, to stepping into a new life.
Later, in casual conversation to my partner I tell him that today in ceremony I forgave someone who raped me. He stops my casualness to tell me that it’s a big deal, that what I did was massive. I’m grateful for his noticing, his witnessing, even in my own rush to be casual with myself.
Day Eighteen
In my reading, I pull the promise of a new life. That what is coming is coming and is meant. A reminder that while we’re a part of nature, it is it’s own universe, and respect has to be earned. Answers of new love with my loves, of deepening stronger, of learning to fly besides and alongside a partner.
It seems so easy to love across similarity. Much harder to love across difference. I can feel it rise in myself, the impulse to squash difference when it comes up, the impulse to flatten into the same so that it can be easier to love. It’s easy too, to see something you love and want to move towards it, to absorb it as your own. It’s much harder to admire something while staying in your own energy, and not absorbing it. It’s easy to see something you dislike and to demonize it as different than you. Harder to see the thing you dislike and locate the echo of it in yourself, what it brings up for you.
I’m working on allowing the difference to be a multiplier of love, instead of a thing that takes me away from love. I’m working on letting the difference inspire and not limit.
Butterflies, butterflies, everywhere. I count the synchronicities. Transformation and new life. Learning to love newly. Learning to step deeper into love and to trust it, to allow it to have its own wings.
My partner and I walk along the Valongo Warf, a former trading outpost for enslaved Africans to Brazil. It opened in 1811 and closed in 1831, and in those twenty years 500,000 enslaved people were brought through the port, dehumanized and sold. The energy is heavy, haunted, and hard to shake. A bee comes up to me and circles around me until I say a prayer. Then it leaves. We leave too, made groggy by the energy, and continue walking around the neighborhood. We go to a garden a few blocks away, and I’m struck by it—how even though the garden is beautiful, it carries sadness alongside it. We see two butterflies flying together and then it starts to rain, a warm downpour.
When we have Iftar we realize that we’ve misestimated our fast by accidently fasting two hours longer than we were supposed to.