The First Step Back into Life

I have been contemplating what the first step back into life actually is.

After such a long descent, my first instinct would have once been to think of resurrection as a movement away from death, finally leaving the darkness behind and turning towards the light. But this no longer feels true to me. There is something too familiar in that movement, another division of reality into what belongs and what must be overcome.

I have no interest in becoming a creature of pure light any more than I have an interest in just being the pitchblack darkness.

Something else has been revealing itself.

The first movement back into life is not leaving death behind at all. It is finally allowing Death to sit on its own throne. Not ruling the entire kingdom, as it sometimes has in my life, but neither exiled into some distant chamber where I have to pretend it does not exist. Death has a rightful place here. Darkness has a rightful place here. And so do Life and Light.

I used to think healing meant that eventually enough consciousness would dissolve the darkness, enough healing would remove the wound, enough trust would overcome fear and enough life would finally defeat death. Increasingly I find the opposite to be true. Wholeness arises when nothing essential is being exiled from its rightful place.

Death does not make Life less sacred. Death is part of what makes Life sacred. Darkness does not diminish Light. It gives Light depth. There is no other without the other.

There is nothing fundamentally broken in this arrangement.

This has brought me to a question that feels almost painfully simple:

Can I consent to being alive?

Can I consent to Life as it actually is, to entering something I cannot control, knowing that everything I love is transient? Can I allow myself to love what I cannot keep, inhabit a body knowing it will change, age and die, build something knowing it may someday fall apart, and give myself completely to this strange experience of being here without demanding that Life first remove Death from the agreement?

This word, consent, has become important to me because my own descent did not truly begin until I gave my permission to it.

The call had been there for a very long time. I had felt something pulling me towards the depths since I was very young, and for decades I fought it with everything I had. I tried to remain on the surface, tried to build the kind of life I thought I was supposed to want, and tried harder when trying did not work.

Eventually I reached the place where I could no longer continue that way. I fell to my knees, crossed my hands and admitted to God that I did not know how to do this. I could not keep directing my life through the same mechanisms that had brought me there.

Something in me finally said:

Okay. I give my permission. Guide me.

Looking back, this feels important. Surrender was not simply something that happened when I became powerless enough. There was a moment of participation in it. The door may have been waiting for me for decades, but something changed when I consciously agreed to walk through it.

And real consent cannot be manufactured by the mind. The mind can say I surrender while the entire body is still gripping the edge of the known world with white knuckles. The kind of consent I am speaking about has to come from somewhere much deeper. It has to come from the bones. From the root. There is a moment when something at the bottom of the being finally says: Yes. Whatever this asks of me, let us begin.

What fascinates me now is that I am standing before the same mystery from the other direction.

The descent required my consent. And entering Life does too.

I have spent a very long time learning how to descend, how to let things die, how to sit in darkness and how to release identities and structures when they are no longer true. Somewhere along the way, death became familiar territory. I learned that I could survive enormous internal endings and that sometimes what looked like destruction was simply the breaking apart of a form that could no longer contain life.

Now I find myself facing another kind of surrender: allowing myself to participate fully in being alive. Making Love with existence itself.

And strangely, I think the power needed to say yes at the root comes from the opposite end of the axis: the crown.

There has always been some memory in me of a state in which separation is not ultimately real. I don’t mean an intellectual belief that “everything is one.” I mean something quieter and older, a knowing that has sometimes been the thinnest silver thread I could hold onto while descending into places where almost everything else disappeared.

Somewhere underneath the identities, the stories, the wounds and the things I thought I had to become, there was a memory that I could not actually fall out of the Whole.

That is why I could descend at all.

And now I see the root and the crown looking at each other across the whole length of the body.

The root knows incarnation intimately. It knows vulnerability, impermanence and the strange fragility of having a body and loving things that cannot be kept forever. The crown carries another kind of remembrance, the knowledge that underneath all this changing form there is no true separation.

The crown does not rescue the root from incarnation. It gives the root enough trust to enter it completely.

And the root keeps the crown honest. It pulls union out of abstraction and puts it into flesh, blood, soil, grief, hunger, touch, relationship, mortality and ordinary human life. Without the root, Holy Union could become another beautiful way of escaping the world. Without the crown, incarnation could become an unbearable experience of separation and loss.

They need each other.

This is what sacred union means to me at its most fundamental level: the restoration of each force to its rightful place.

Life and light on its throne.

Death and darkness on its throne.

They do not become less distinct through union. Their full strength is what makes the union possible. Death gives preciousness to Life. Darkness gives depth to Light. Form allows the formless to become visible. The temporary gives us something we can actually touch, love and lose.

And suddenly the idea that there is nothing to heal begins to make sense to me in a completely different way.

Of course there are wounds that need tending. There are patterns that need changing, grief that needs grieving, nervous systems that need safety, lies that need exposing and broken things that sometimes need repairing. I have spent years in that laboratory, dissolving what needed dissolving, burning what needed burning, separating what had become entangled and slowly giving new form to what wanted to live.

But underneath all of that there has never been anything fundamentally wrong with Life.

Some of our deepest suffering begins when one of the great forces of existence is thrown from its throne and exiled. When darkness is exiled, we become terrified of what we cannot see. When death is exiled, it becomes difficult to surrender ourselves fully to loving what is temporary. Without anger we can lose contact with the force of our No, and without desire we can lose the thread that pulls us towards life. Even darkness itself can become another kind of throne from which everything lighter, simpler and more ordinary begins to look somehow less profound or less true.

Wholeness begins to look less like perfecting the kingdom and more like allowing the exiles to return to their rightful places.

And this is why my movement towards Life does not feel like turning my back on the Underworld. I don’t want to become less capable of darkness so that I can become more capable of light. I want both to become so firmly seated in me that neither needs to impersonate the whole.

And now a sentence that came to me earlier this year makes sense, fully in both not in between.

Then Death no longer needs to pull me away from Life. It can become the dark rich soil underneath it.

And somewhere between root and crown, between the knowledge that I will die and the remembrance that I cannot fall out of the Whole, another kind of Yes becomes possible. It is a quieter Yes than the one I once imagined resurrection would require. There is no promise of safety inside it and no need to have conquered the darkness first. It comes from knowing more intimately what the agreement of incarnation actually contains, and finding that something in my bones is willing to enter it anyway.

Yes. I consent to being alive.