Pain

“Give me silence, water, hope
Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.”
― Pablo Neruda

She whispered into my ear, “Spirit longs for pain, for its dazzle and brazen will.” The black molasses medicine churned my insides. Dizzy, I gazed at the shaman who sat idle in her wooden throne. I wanted to ask if I was going to be ok, but I was too baracho to speak. Still, glints of light, otherworldly and thin, trickled through. “Silence my love. Let go.”

A large skull approached me and opened its mouth. I sensed that if I chose, the skull would swallow me whole, in which case Madre Ayahuasca would have her way with me. I leaned forward, not fully understanding what I was offering, and let go. 

Instantly I found myself sitting on a redrock mesa, the same mesa where my wife and I said our vows. ‘What am I doing here?’ I thought. ‘Why did the plants bring me here?’ I glassed the horizon, running my gaze across the terracotta skyline. A strong breeze raised dust and sand from a parched valley floor, spreading it over patches of diamond snow and finally over me. 

Hearing music, I turned to see my wife and I holding hands. We appear impossibly young, tender to the idea of life spent together. Her hazel eyes smiled as she read her vows from memory. 

Clouds coalesced overhead and bolts of lightning began to pound the earth, splintering the ground around us. I wanted to protect them, I wanted to tell them to stop, that a thing felt in heart will inevitably break them, that unspeakable pain lay ahead. But I could not speak. I could not move. 

A bolt of lightning jolted through me and I was now in our first home. Liz is standing in front of me, her eyes wild. She heaves a dinner plate against the floor, shattering it into countless shards. She drops to the ground and begins to cry. I see the spirit of our first child leave her womb and drift away. I sit beside her as her torso rings with grief, our bodies growing roots out and into one another.

I am now back in the desert, this time away from the mesa. I am lying on a canyon floor, paralyzed as the earth begins to move around me. The dirt, iridescently radiant, glimmers hues of brick red and iron black. The sun above me is swallowed by a fleet of grey, cumulus clouds, their spires flaring with electricity. Wind kicks dirt up over me, and slowly, insidiously, particles of iron begin seeping into my pores. I am suddenly in a doctor’s office being told I have a genetic disorder that doesn’t allow me to process iron. “Everyone of your symptoms can be explained by this disorder,” she explained. “The fatigue, the memory loss, the joint pain: it’s all from a toxic level of iron in your blood.”

I look at her dazed, lost in a fog. I am relieved to have a diagnosis and yet I have been battling the disorder for over six years. I am wary of new life. It feels implausible. I stumble out of the doctor’s office and collapse back into the canyon floor, my body sinking into the earth. Heavy. Dense. And without hope. I become rock, a buried monolith inseparable from the sedimentary sandstone that is the foundation of this land.  

A distant part of me screams out in protest, but the voice is too thin to push through the density to which I now belong. ‘I spent six years in this realm,’ I thought. ‘I spent six years slowly succumbing to Hemochromatosis, a disease that would have killed me if undiagnosed.’ Rain begins to pour, seeping through the earth and trickling into me. Roots gradually unfurl from my spine and push upward. Slowly, audaciously, I rise up and out of the ground.

I open my eyes and breathe. The medicine has retreated and I find myself lucid and teary eyed, sweet grief roiling over me. A voice within me speaks. It is my voice, but somehow otherworldly in its wisdom. “You have long wondered why, why you must abide the dark night and the bitter cold. Can you see why? Why you would want to endeavor upon such a journey, the journey of this human incarnation? Why undergo the broken bones and pangs of despair inherent to this life? Can you see now?”

I could sense in that moment that my life was like a painting, as if the universe chose to express herself through the medium of human incarnation. And somehow, this expression helps deepen the spiritual world, fleshing out in granular detail different aspects of her longing. I could feel that my soul longed for the pain of this world, for heartbreak and disease, not to toughen me up, but to guide me, deftly and absolutely, towards reverence and life itself. 

Up until that point, I had spent much of my life in a dissociative haze. Although my avoidance of emotion was rooted primarily in physiological aspects of PTSD, I also suspected something larger: that I brought into this life a proclivity for ethereal realms, realms thin in both substance and suffering. Up until that point, I would have gladly chosen the anesthetic of highmindedness over the sputtering fire of human anguish. And yet now I saw in stunning clarity that life, in its full veracity, lives within that fire. And any attempt to lessen its fervancy is simply a missed opportunity to experience the beauty of this one fleeting life. 

I could also see that struggle, as conveyed by Madre Ayahuasca, is unspeakably beautiful, so beautiful that my soul willed itself into physical form so as to be enriched by it. In other words, the ache and grime of this human stint brought my soul further into being. The harsh contrast of this physical form, with its countless hues and vibrations, was a sort of song that lured me into the entirety of my force. It was this force, this procreant will of life that pushes and reaches, that binds and destroys, that Madre Ayahuasca, was asking me to more fully embody. And that I will spend a lifetime trying to embody. 

I instantly felt regretful of all the avoiding I had done. The desperate sprints away from pain. The dispersed starry mind floating perennially on the edges of life. Countless years lost here and immeasurable suffering endured. It’s this avoidance of necessary pain that Buddhist psychology warns us of. It’s the hope that we can somehow evade the inherent slings and arrows of life and yet still feel alive. But alas, we cannot.

If only I had the courage to drop the scurry, to dovetail into my core and take my seat as a dignified, whole human. If only I weren’t so afraid of pain, of life. Perhaps I would have lived a little more fully, loved a little more tenderly. And yet now, having meandered through much of my life halfheartedly and I am committing the rest of my days to doing exactly that.