Past the Black

A couple of months before all of my tea cups got dumped on the floor, one of my guides came to me with a terribly worried expression on his face that made me feel a dread like I had never experienced. He told me I had to hang onto myself. This had to be done. This was going to hurt like nothing before. Ice grew around my heart and made me wish that the heart attack I had earlier in the year had taken me, but I nodded and gritted my teeth as he wrapped me in a cocoon of kelp. He promised me he would be with me the entire time and that he would take me to where I needed to go and back himself. He didn't promise me I would be okay or come out unscathed, in fact, with a frightened undertone to his voice, he told me he didn't how how this would come out. With a tether of kelp attached to me tied and bound we delved deep into the ocean and as we went I heard a snatch of a song.

Take me down to the river bend
Take me down to the fighting end
Wash the poison from off my skin
Show me how to be whole again

Fly me up on a silver wing
Past the black where the sirens sing
Warm me up in a nova's glow
And drop me down to the dream below

We had gone so deep neither of us could see and we were still diving. I could feel his fear and mine. I remember blacking out before the experience was over.

Months passed. Tea cups had been shattered in my life and left on the floor in countless shards. No word, no visit, no anything from my guide. I felt alone and betrayed. I had been going to acupuncture, counseling, and doing meditations to help myself. Still no visit, no word, not even a sign in the mundane world. It happened there in the middle of an acupuncture session. My guide showed up while I was trying to assist the process of healing myself. I found myself in a dark part of the ocean deep barely able to see anything. He was there and shredding through my cocoon calling me by my mundane name! Hearing a guide call me like that was something I had never experienced before. It was alarming. He looked alarmed as well. He kept asking if I was okay and I remember not being able to respond. We just looked at each other for a moment, both of us alarmed. He determined I was not well enough to be swimming on my own so he attached a tether before he started to bring me closer to surface. I remember seeing light through the water finally and feeling like maybe the blackness could end before my acupuncturist walked in to start the process of removing the needles in my body. I was relieved to see my guide. I felt for the first time like not everything about me had been lost in this process.

This weekend I was on the road back to Tucson. On the back of a truck was an encircled logo of a fish tail surfacing above the water. I think I was just waved at. The signs around me are starting to come back for me to read. I now know beyond the blackness of the ocean's abyss that I was never alone. He kept true to his word. Maybe the poison is finally starting to wash away from me.