Me: I see it so clearly now. Why I hold on so tight. Why the idea of never seeing someone again, even casual acquaintances, brings up echoes of hopeless dread and wrenching, deep sorrow.
Multiple Ancestors: They took everything from us. Ripped us from home. Never to see parents, children, cousins, best friends again. Never to know their faces or their fates.
Me: I can’t imagine. Even now I feel waves of helplessness.
MA: You don’t have to imagine. It’s in you.
Me: How could we possibly heal from such a severing?
MA: Don’t you see? It’s an illusion. Like dipping a bowl in the ocean and then leaving it, full, on the beach, believing you’ve separated the water within it from the depths forever. Evaporation, the slow decay of the bowl. Eventually, that water will physically make its way back to the waves.
Me: Yes. I feel that.
MA: You could take that bowl hundreds of kilometres inland, walk it up a mountain. It doesn’t matter. Energetically, that water is always connected to the ocean. More than connected. It always is the ocean.
Me: Peace.
MA: Only if the water forgets itself, panics and grieves, will it fall into the temporary illusion of separation and experience deep pain from the belief that it’s connection has been severed.
Me: That grasping panic is gone.
MA: And so it is.