Phase One

A Ceremony, A Poem, A Decision, A Choice

“For leaving the fridge open
last night, I forgive you.
For conjuring white curtains
instead of living your life.”¹

Dilruba Ahmed starts her moving poem Phase One with these lines and continues with the same kind of fierce yet lighthearted compassion in the next fifty two lines that follow. I found this fine poem—certainly belonging to the life-saver category of poems—in a dark hour, and I can tell by the way it landed in my consciousness that it was a gift from the gods of poetry.

I was recently the recipient of a ceremony that called to me from the imaginal. I need to remind you that I use the word imaginal not as fantasy or daydreaming but as an ontological threshold through which we receive inspiration and invitations from an invisible field. Charlotte Du Cann calls it “The dreaming fabric of the world.”. This is where my listening ears are mostly pointed toward these days …

The intention of the ceremony was to make a big prayer to support a life transition. And even though the small community of women that gathered prayed for my life, the beauty and strength that were generated through the container of prayer suffused all of us. A ceremony is never for an individual but for the whole community; in fact, the wisdom of ancient ceremonies focuses on releasing the individual from the tight and suffocating boundaries of an illusory, separate self. The whole point is to re-member the initiate into the wide and wild web of life, and community surrounding her.

I was bound in a cocoon for a long time, you see, a woman-cave with white curtains.
I was forced to my knees, in agony over shedding every little bit of my precious achievements, attachments, and even relationships that I had accumulated over the years, facing the barebones of my life. Clearly an Inanna²-esque moment.

When the layers fall off and time slows down, sometimes the old monsters hidden between the crevices of a previously busy life—cozily anesthetized by female hormones during reproductive years—reappear: Long forgotten exiles, outcasts and ghosts of the psyche start crawling out of their dark holes and ask for a seat at your table. They need to be fed with proper “ritual” food, reconciled with and then returned to their cosmic home. But some are more persistent than others …

In the myths, the protagonist never survives an existential crisis during an archetypal journey on her own; there’s always some kind of divine help delivered at a crucial threshold, in the form of angels, animals, ancestors, wise elders, and other non-ordinary beings. Though going through transitions in our lives definitely requires our own painstaking labour, at some point a midwife is more than welcome.

So I called for help. I turned to the wisest and kindest women in my life, including my beloved Debra, and invited them to witness me as I petitioned to Great Spirit for a safe and sound return from the underworld. And so they did. We joined hands on the summer solstice, like our ancestors did for thousands of years, and prayed. I was elevated throughout the ceremony, and the following week flew by in a dreamlike, altered state. I was literally blasted—by fierce love and kindness— out of my old skin, and invited to step up to a new consciousness in the presence of the sheer beauty and power of sisterhood. It was transformative for all of us.

As the ceremony drew to a close, I felt—and still feel—utterly responsible for the gift I received and to the people—representing the larger community—from whom I received it. When one is bestowed with such goodness, there is a natural, almost unstoppable movement of reciprocity that rises within. I could sense a new, quiet and strong vow taking deep root in my psyche: to take loving care of this one wild and precious life. This insight did not emerge as a mental afterthought. It is an embodied commitment arising from the direct experience of my intimate entanglement with an infinite field of relationships. It was as if my capacity to do any kind of self-harm—in thought, talk or deed—were taken away from me by a flood of gratitude.

The Next Morning

After such deep and long experiences there is always the next morning.

I wondered who I would be following the ceremony, and the very end of Elizabeth Gilbert’s epic TED talk “Your elusive creative genius” kept playing in my mind: (Please watch this short clip from this talk as I will be making references to it in the rest of this writing)

I am keenly aware that though a ceremony can be powerful and transformative, it is merely a head start on the real task of living and embodying the prayer in everyday life.

The truth is I’ve been struggling to pull this experience into my body, and even more so in the absence of the village. Not the next morning, but the next week I found myself as an aging mortal with an aching body in the silence of my solitude, just like it was before the ceremony. And even though I knew this was going to happen, I let myself slip for a moment into my old habitual reactions—doubts, impatience, grievance (not the same as grief), and a self-bashing narrative.

Had I failed the ceremony, my community, myself?

When I realized what was happening, I turned the pages of the nearest poetry book and came across Phase One (please see the full poem in the footnotes). The poem sat me down quietly and curled up on my lap like a purring cat. I smiled through my tears. What better remedy than an exquisite poem to remind me to humor myself, to be patient and to trust, to trust it all, right this moment.

Phase One. Of course the poem is called that! I am telling you, this perfect symmetry, this kind of humor is only possible because the muses spare me, every time.

The thing is, the ceremony was largely to ensure my active participation—trust and surrender—in the imagination of life as well as petitioning and summoning invisible forces for help. I believe life imagines for us and with us, and each life carries a spark of the numinous creative fire, no matter our circumstances. The miracle is not that things change overnight, but it is to take the leap of trust and keep trusting. Every day, every moment, there is a choice to be made—to either succumb to infinite imperfections and grievances of our world, or to make peace with the human condition and find freedom within it to make a beautiful life.

The prayer is planted. Now, phase one begins. My heart is full.

“… I forgive you. For growing
a capacity for love that is great
but matched only, perhaps,
by your loneliness. For being unable

to forgive yourself first so you
could then forgive others and
at last find a way to become
the love that you want in this world.”³

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1. Excerpt from the poem Phase One by Dilruba Ahmed, which I found in Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó Tuama, recently gifted to me by Debra Roberts.

PHASE ONE
by Dilruba Ahmed

For leaving the fridge open
last night, I forgive you.
For conjuring white curtains
instead of living your life.

For the seedlings that wilt, now,
in tiny pots, I forgive you.
For saying no first
but yes as an afterthought.

I forgive you for hideous visions
after childbirth, brought on by loss
of sleep. And when the baby woke
repeatedly, for your silent rebuke

in the dark, “What’s your beef?”
I forgive your letting vines
overtake the garden. For fearing
your own propensity to love.

For losing, again, your bag
en route from San Francisco;
for the equally heedless drive back
on the caffeine-fueled return.

I forgive you for leaving
windows open in rain
and soaking library books
again. For putting forth

only revisions of yourself,
with punctuation worked over,
instead of the disordered truth,
I forgive you. For singing mostly

when the shower drowns
your voice. For so admiring
the drummer you failed to hear
the drum. In forgotten tin cans,

may forgiveness gather. Pooling
in gutters. Gushing from pipes.
A great steady rain of olives
from branches, relieved

of cruelty and petty meanness.
With it, a flurry of wings, thirteen
gray pigeons. Ointment reserved
for healers and prophets. I forgive you.

I forgive you. For feeling awkward
and nervous without reason.
For bearing Keats’s empty vessel
with such calm you worried

you had, perhaps, no moral
center at all. For treating your mother
with contempt when she deserved
compassion. I forgive you. I forgive

you. I forgive you. For growing
a capacity for love that is great
but matched only, perhaps,
by your loneliness. For being unable

to forgive yourself first so you
could then forgive others and
at last find a way to become
the love that you want in this world.

2. In the Sumerian myth of “The Descent of Inanna into the Underworld” we learn about Goddess Inanna’s journey to the Great Below. She passes through seven gates, and at each gate she is stripped of some important belonging.

“Inanna asked:
‘What is this?’
She was told:
‘Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect.
They may not be questioned.’”

Quote from Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer by Diane Wolkstein, Samuel Noah Kramer.

3. Excerpt from the poem Phase One by Dilruba Ahmed. Please see footnote 1 to for the whole poem.