The Original Home

I came into the world unwelcome, a nuisance that needed to be fed and held and treated tenderly.

Some of those things happened. Others did not.

And so these cells, this flesh, these neural pathways, this energy body, carried with it the deep secret that it did not belong here. This was not home.

Gazing up at the sun in the backyard of the pre-school I attended, the glow, the shine peeking from behind the roof — maybe it was a bell tower; it felt like it was, or maybe that’s a memory from lifetimes ago, while doing the very same gazing - my face turned toward it, like daffodils seeking sunlight after a dark winter. I looked into the sun, too young to know you didn’t do such things, but instinctively longing for the light.

Perhaps there were angels that whispered to me to hang on.

Maybe it was wise ones that guarded me - who knows - holding my own field of light in wait for me, tending to the flame so that I may meet it, and them, fully, in later years, long after these decades of pain and struggle and not belonging. Finding home in that sun, in that light, in the felt sense that I am held and cared for, not by the humans assigned to raise me, but by beings and a sense of my own Being-ness I have known through eons. Home? My home was not here.

I carried my home with me. Not as a snail or turtle might, an outer shell protecting them from wind and rain and kids’ sticky fingers and stomping feet. No, my home was within. A hidden treasure of sorts, just patiently holding steady inside, not wanting anything back. Not recognition for itself. Not really, for me, either, that is, the me I believed I was.

This home was my birthright.

This gazing at the sun, at the light coming over the top of the roof — again, maybe a steeple? A bell tower? So dramatic, I know, and I’m not sure what pre-school it was in Sunnyvale or Cupertino, California in the 70s, so who’s to say — and that light saying hello. “Remember me? I know you do.” Yes I do. I do remember.

Once I began learning Dzogchen practices, the direct path, they say in Buddhism, I remembered. Oh yes, these were the familiar practices I did on the playground. 4 and 5 years old, eyes open, gazing downward, awareness of Awareness, resting as my Being, this consciousness, conscious of itSelf. The blessed U turn of knowing oneself as It and All, nothing and everything at once.

When I eventually learned meditation, Shamatha, — the basics of taking one’s own breath as the object of attention — oh yes, this I’ve done. Again, eyes open, breathing naturally, staring at the knot in the wooden bottom of the bunk bed above me, age 7. Chaos swirling in my family home, I’d go into deep absorption. Soon the knot of wood disappeared, and I was in a light bliss whose foundation was peace. A vast open field where I no longer existed, yet I was This.

A knock at the door.

“Sarah, dinner’s ready!”

I jolt back to time and place and seemingly solid reality and jump off the bed, gathering myself once again, congealing into something/someone who is safe and doesn’t make waves.

I’d gather myself over and over again, out of survival, out of a wounded wisdom that was right at the time; and this gathering up, this solidifying, this congealing saved me. How sacred this sense of self can be to a young yogi who has lessons to learn, and karma to experience, and skillsets to develop, out of necessity. Out of contractual obligation, perhaps! It’s not yet time to rest as the Self. Not yet, dear one…just wait.

And so in time, as the years passed, I took this self to be what I needed to belong in the world. It was my home, my tortoise or snail shell, shielding me from the world, hiding my light within, a secret that eventually becomes a secret to even the one who keeps it.

A blessed undoing would take decades.

Who I’d become was a reaction. A response. A concoction of cause and effect.

Who am I without struggle, without fighting against, or fighting for; fleeing from and fleeing to?

Why this. A whisper. Something entirely unnoticeable, transparent, translucent, not even arrived yet, never having occurred, and yet very much here.