Jan 30

always by your side

i’ve had “by your side” by sade stuck in my heart for years. it was released october 3, 2000. interesting to think of songs released in the year of 2000 as setting the tone for this millennium, the likes of which include "with arms wide open" by creed and "i wanna know" by joe. maybe somehow everything that happened in 2000 shaped the spirit of the current millennium. then again, the demarcation of time itself is an arbitrary construct from the viewpoint of the eternal now.

i put the song on in the car, driving home with my sister after meeting with her friend for some banh mi sandwiches. it was sunset, and as sade sang i could feel the center pushing through my blossoming heart.

in the view of a single human life, time is a subject of great fixation. time is money, they say. time is however many breaths you have left before your body expires. time is precious. time spent with others is life given to others. time is the narrative you keep in your mind from dusk till dawn, until returning definitely to your timeless sleep. that’s why life in dreams is akin to visiting the land of the dead – for in dreams we transcend the creative limitations of the physical body to experience the mighty gift of instantaneous imagination.

in my dream this morning, i found myself scrambling to get back under the desk in my mother’s little office when she worked as a minister. in my physical life, my mother no longer serves at that church, and in fact that church itself is no longer a church – it was sold to the food project to provide nourishment for the unhoused. but in my dream, in that astral state, the office was just as real as ever, a constructed memory projection for which my mind made no distinction between the past and the present.

when i was a kid i liked to hide under my mother’s desk in that office of hers. it was a big dark wooden desk with two shelves on the left and right side, and a large opening underneath the pull-out drawer above, spacious for leg room, and, being a nine-year old kid, providing a nice little nook to lie down under. my mother’s desk was like a cave for me to burrow in, so i wouldn’t have to look or talk to church-goers who entering the room to talk to my mother. we had to get to church early, around 8am, and the service didn’t start until 10am, so i frequently took advantage of that time to nap.

but in the dream, i found that the desk i knew so well in waking life no longer provided that comfort – there was hardly any room to crawl under it anymore. whether i had grown or the desk had shrunk didn’t matter – the dream seemed to point very clearly to the fact that something i once found respite in no longer carried the same comfort.

upon waking, a sudden and painful realization came: this church was a place i could no longer return to — or that anyone could. in fact, it isn’t a church anymore. perhaps it has become a different kind of sanctuary, but it is no longer what it once was. tears began to flow as i recognized something i hadn’t consciously allowed myself to see until now: it was gone. so many things in life are like this — doors to little paradises we only recognize in hindsight, already closed by the time we notice them. how quickly subjective reality can change...

beyond my personal interpretations of the dream, a lot of doors to previous comforts are closing in the world right now, for all of us — institutions we trusted, identities we once leaned on, the sense that things would more or less continue as they were. this has always been the case, of course. life moves in cycles that destabilize what once felt solid, and not everything that happens in this world is within our control. this much is clear.

i think that for this reason, grieving has a very real, practical, spiritual purpose. to grieve is to learn how to make peace with death gracefully. when grief has done its work — when we finally accept that something no longer moves us to such heightened emotion — it becomes a kind of quiet, liberating resurrection. the end result of grief fully grieved is peace: the ability to look at what was lost with clarity, to let it rest, and to open ourselves to a deeper sense of life.

many of the biblical myths are, at their core, stories of a grieving people in transition — noah and his ark, moses crossing the red sea, lot and his daughters fleeing from sodom — each one moving away from what has been lost in search of an elusive promised land.

this metaphor of not looking back is profound. to not look back is to let things that are dead be dead, and to not fixate on them so as to squander the life still ahead. very 5 of cups energy, for you tarot people out there. very “you can never go back and the answer is no / and wishing for it only makes it bleed” energy for you tom waits fans out there.

as far as i understand, the purpose of having a body at all is to contend with the various attachments and aversions that come with being an incarnate part of creation — to feel separation fully, so that the body itself can eventually dissolve, both physically and mentally, into a deeper appreciation of its unified essence. in that sense, figures like jesus and his father, the jiva and ishvara, or hanuman and shiva are not merely stories or archetypes; they point to the same truth: the embodied path is a path of many toward the one — one with yourself, without clinging to any container, form, or protection.

and so, what does my mom’s old desk have to do with this? well, it points to the same truth: even the love of your own mother, and even the “nest” you cling to for creature comfort, will not suffice on this path. the only support that truly matters is the one you cultivate with your cosmic source — your god, your shiva, your amma, your atman, your inner self. when that union is realized, you will feel it as a quiet, abiding presence. you will remember that, in the deepest sense, you were always “by your side.”

what is it we're trying to hide from under our mother's desk anyway? could it be, this great explosive aliveness that i am, in the untamed and aweful face of one another, without any pretenses or posturing?

if sade’s beautiful song says anything about where the 2000s are headed, it points to one simple, profound question: what does it really mean to be by your side? in this age of collapsing identities, that question becomes the central mystery. it’s a simple message, yet one that comes straight from the heart.

oh, when you’re cold i’ll be there to hold you tight to me
oh, when you’re low i’ll be there by your side, baby

with infinite love,
thank you