Blue Heron Healing

Misty Morning

This foggy morning I can't see the end of my street.  It's like that scene from A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge is making his way home through the streets of London.  The lamp light is shrouded in fog when a horse-drawn coffin passes by and disappears into thin air.  It leaves Scrooge blinking, famously doubting his senses.

These impressions echo something I read yesterday in Stuart Wilde's Infinite Self:

This sacred and holy journey -- the journey away from ego toward the infinite self -- is a journey through a fog.  You're only going to be able to see a few steps in front of you.

Right.  I get it. 

Let me back up here. 

This week, the town where my family lives, in upstate New York, has been rocked by tragedy.  A beautiful young woman, 18 year old Alexandra Kogut, left her hometown for SUNY Brockport last month.  Last weekend she was beaten to death by her boyfriend.  I'm not clear on the details; he may have been a former boyfriend, but he traveled to see her and now she's dead.

The entire town, where both the victim and the perpetrator grew up, is in mourning.  Last night when I called my sister, she was on her way out to a candle-light vigil.  My niece graduated with this girl, class of 2012.  My nephew is in the same grade as her younger sister.  My parents know her grandparents.  Someone posted a tribute on facebook, photo after photo of groups of kids, laughing and smiling, with their whole lives in front of them.

Or so it would seem.

At my sister's request I settled into meditation to send healing.  I tried. I tried not trying.  But it felt futile, too late.  It seemed to me that there is no healing.

So here I am groundless, lost in the fog.

Since there's no making sense of it, my only option is to place it on the altar of reality -- this horrible thing has happened -- and give it to the Great Goddess of nurturing and healing to lead every stunned person wherever it is they need to go.  To accompany them through the realms of sadness and immeasurable grief.

My prayer is that they find relief and peace.  But it seems to me that there will never be relief or peace.  I watch my mind wrestling in the roped-off  ring of my awareness, valiantly trying to pin down a much more muscular challenger -- a chain of events that have it clearly overwhelmed. 

And yet there's that part of me that's witnessing this struggle.  This larger awareness, like the overhead light that illuminates this whole inner boxing match, is somehow able to contain the tragedy and my futile attempt to understand it.

When I can find this part of my being, which seems strangely outside of time and space, there is relief.  There is peace.

Alexandra has returned to her infinite self.  May she spread pebbles of peace in the path of her loved ones as they integrate their senseless loss.