Non(sense)-Duality

In some ways, it began when I listened to them speak. It wasn’t their words, it wasn’t what they were speaking about. It was what their voices were made of. Yearning, sorrow, hope, suffering, fear. Love. Pouring out of their eyes, pouring out of their mouths as sounds that took the shape of a life’s story.

(shaking my head). No. It began when I went to China. I had spent a year swallowed by insanity and when it spit me back out, I found myself sitting in an airport, a ticket to Beijing in my hand. It’s not like I was looking to find myself in Machu Picchu. I wasn’t backpacking my way across the Great Wall. I wasn’t learning to be a Buddhist in a Chinese temple. No. It was just life again. Life always dragging me places I didn’t want to go.

But I expect the true beginning lies in what led me to China in the first place. That smoke-like, ethereal, disembodied arm that punched deep into my chest and grabbed hold of my soul. The legion that I didn’t know had been hiding inside me, burrowed deep in my thigh muscles, my guts, my back, my neck – all of it finally exorcised in one agonizingly long living nightmare of a night. One tremendous, incredulous, epic battle over … of all things …

my soul. Yes. I suppose that is where it all begins. This is, in many ways, a story about all the darkness I carried.

***

My name is Frances, pronounced exactly the same as Francis, except it’s e for a she instead of i for a guy. The name Frances supposedly means “free.” This was not obvious if you’ve ever come across me. There was nothing free about me.

It could, however, be considered prophetic. Without knowing it, I spent my whole life yearning to live up to my name.

***

I have been a sleeping princess. I have been the prince who had to learn his own kiss was the only thing that would open my own eyes. I have been the dragon I needed to slay.

I have clutched the gates of heaven and was found wanting. I have ripped apart a family. I have touched hell and left with my soul. I have spent a year with insanity and left finally knowing the true taste of sanity.

I have been a bad student, a straight A student, a good daughter, a bad daughter, a harlot, an artist, a poet, a sailor, a dutiful wife, a mother, a Christian, a lover of God, a lover of new age, an orator, a mathematician, a teacher, an entrepreneur, a yogi, a meditator, a psychotic, a zealot, an addict, a conspiracy theorist, a savior of the world, a vagabond, a spiritual seeker – only to find myself wanting. Every. Single. Time.

I have sung songs that call angels forth from their hiding places to sing harmony. Our voices mixed makes me weep. I have touched the birthplace of poetry. I have seen the universe explode into being straight out of your eyes.

You have never heard of me.