Holding

“To laugh from a holy place, where language doesn’t matter, skin color doesn’t matter, just the fact that you are all going through this journey together, wishing for the same thing in your beautiful way.”

There is a special kind of heart in this world, that opens up to the desire of connecting with the other. It involves connecting with a part of ourselves you have never seen before. There’s a certain type of thrill to it, very similar to being on a roller coaster ride for the first couple of times. Then after a while, that rush of it dissipates. What comes in afterward, is the desire to connect with what is alive in the person you are with at that time. When you both are mutually looking at the same thing. The other not recognizing you, you not recognizing them. The magic in the middle that CAN open, if you allow it. Often you see this doorway open up, and you want to close it completely down because by it being open a piece of our world will come crumbling right down. If you exist, my world can’t exist. But what if it can? This is something I’ve loved traveling with throughout my days in Europe, Australia, and Canada. Seeing the other show up, without even realizing that was what I was looking into. The cast of fear looming over it, I pushed away for years later. Begging the fear to leave me alone so that I can look at the eyes of someone I’ve never seen before. To let them look at me as well. Something they have never seen before. A beauty they have never experienced in their world. How often do you meet a beautiful Dominican and Ecuadorian American? Let me know, so far I’ve only met one other person with a similar mix.  Oftentimes, you want to obliterate the other. To shatter it completely so it doesn’t exist anymore. To keep our egos intact, so we may live another day. Being in the landscape of otherness gives you such a tremendous gift, not everyone is going to appreciate or even see.  Some may relate to you, when you meet those people, keep an eye on them. See if they sit with otherness from a place of wholeness, or from a place of integration still coming into place. Not everyone is here to live the same life and build the same white picket fence that was given to us as the ‘dream’ for this American life.  You have your own dreams to grow in this life, you have a legacy. Part of the responsibility of building that dream, and growing it, is noticing where you are in harmony with your surroundings. If that special space of otherness between you and your neighbors is vibrating together to create harmony, or if it’s showing up in dissonance, creating chaos, conflict, more trauma, more pain, because someone in the space needs that and is attached to darkness. You get to choose which door to live out from. Which door to create a home from, to harmonize with. For some, it’s a black door into nowhere, that once you pass through, whatever was in your heart just before entering is what ends up showing up on the other side. No transformation, the same thing looping over and over and over again. Feeding the darkness, to keep certain stories alive of otherness that creates separation. A black door, a voice, a void, asking to be looked at. Darkness is different from otherness, which is why when you see otherness, your immediate reaction can be fear. You have been taught to fear otherness and cast it into darkness.  Your invitation here is to see where the door where light is present opens up for you. To enter through that door, to witness the transformation that occurs as you enter into it, surrender to it, give into it, and leave behind that void space. To transform darkness, not from fear, but from your desire to step into the light. Your shine is what illuminates. Harmony is what comes through at the other end. Truth. Transformation. Your otherness becomes the offering.

Otherness is another way you allow yourself to stay connected to what is true when you let go of the fighting about who is right, who needs to justify the other’s experience, and just connect at a primal place of humanity. Of blood, sweat, tears, joy, laughter, and spit. To laugh from a holy place, where language doesn’t matter, skin color doesn’t matter, just the fact that you are all going through this journey together, wishing for the same thing in your beautiful way. All the shades of it, pouring outward, a reflection of all our years of generational trauma, personal trauma, and planetary trauma. To get caught up on it, between each other, and not enjoy the moment of our divine connection, that my friend, is what keeps you from loving yourself. In those rare moments where the divine offers you a mirror into your soul, reflected upon the face of another who is brought here on this planet to look back at your divinity. Not caring about where you are from, how old you are, or what you want to do with your day. That momentary existence, fleeting, reminds us of the wholeness inside every single person you meet. Passing presence together, laughing in our way, and opening our hearts to the divine just the same.  The otherness guides you to yourself when you let go of the cloaks of safety and allow yourself to embrace the warmth of your own heart. Beating against another, no matter the distance. Together in that moment, in harmony, divinity, togetherness, no matter the differences. Infinite.