longing & belonging

I had a vision in which I made love with the world. 

The form of my being, indistinguishable

from all else, married to atmospheric particle,

vibrated in cosmic intensitities, quaked

as a great mountain. I visited plateaus

of whole-body pleasure and pain, a trillion

years old, tied up in the archaic and endless

Gordian know of life.

these words were written by my friend alma in her long, prose style essay, In Fertile In-Between Places. they speak to me in what i long for. For porosity. Porosity, with boundaries of discernment as i seek relationship with this wild world of boundless beauty and heartbreak. as i seek to shed some of the cloak of hiding that i have created since my childhood. perhaps some of the feelings were too big, the possibility of loss too great that i needed to create compartments of expression. yesterday when i left the documentary film, No Other Land, i felt like my heart was breaking. i could barely contain myself just to exit the theater and get to my car. it is that level of empathy that scares me and that i have buffered myself from. i was overcome with a deep sadness for the suffering of so many people in the middle east, particularly the Palestinian and the Israeli people who see the suffering and feel complicit in that suffering. my sadness is mixed with anger and rage, at injustice and greed and the terribly complex circumstances that make this particular situation so difficult to solve. how to hold this grief and feel justified in my great blessing of a life and the need to create?