Come, Come, Whoever you are…
This morning I was reading Deema’s Substack (I look forward to it every Friday morning); her words caused me to remember a poem by Rumi:
“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come.”
―Jelaluddin Rumi
She was writing about a completely different subject than I am about to—spiritual practice—but the message remains at its core, the same: show up time and again in your imperfectness and you will be welcomed. Your altar will welcome you. Your spirits, your ancestors, your guides, your deities will welcome you. By arriving, by coming, yet again, is how we overcome the very shame and guilt that holds us back from our greatest discoveries and deepest solace.
Every day I sit with women (and men) who are facing the edge of their fears, clinging to cliff ledges and dangling over precipices that seem to have no bottom or base. Grasping at ideals and standards and concepts thrust upon them since time un-remembered, that causes them to fear what is on the other side: liberation. I hear every excuse cloaked in flawed logic, masquerading as reason under the sun: “I’ve never been…”, “It always turns out…”, “I’ve already failed…”, “I’m too busy…”, “The cost is too great…”. To which I reply with sympathetic nods of knowing and understanding before simply saying “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. You’ve never been good at this, and it always turns out wrong, and you’ve already failed multiple times, and you’re terribly busy, and the cost is far too great. The cost is far too great to give up now when you’ve already come so far. What if this time were different? What if you soared? What if you prioritized your spiritual heart and it made all the difference? What if on the other side of that gaping chasm was the refuge you’ve been craving all along?”
You see, spiritual practice, magic, spell-weaving, isn’t pass or fail. It’s living. It’s thriving. It’s experiencing the world with eyes that see and ears that hear. It’s arriving broken and shattered and mending your soul with swaths of gold and being more resilient and beautiful for it. It’s strength and resolve and compassion and grace. It’s a reclaiming of wildness and unapologetic feralness. Being at one with the very building blocks of the Universe and learning how to not only stack them, but sculpt them… there is no wrong way to be an artist of living. Whether your medium is oil or fiber or words or stone or sound or movement or magic. Come, come, whoever you are. Messily, unkempt, raging, weeping, quiet, roaring, wild, tamed. Imperfect. Come and we will sit at the altar, together, and unsnarl the tangled web that’s been ensnaring us for millennia, and we will joyfully weave a new tapestry of reality, together. We will beat the drum that awakens the heart and dance until the very mountains tremble. We will spin stories and fiber. Stir memories and cauldrons. Most importantly? We will thrive
