Reopening

Remember last year around this time we were all thinking, "Will this ever end?? Is this our life now?' Holed up in our apartments, stuffing ourselves with carrot-cake Oreos and Netflix, deathly afraid to be within 6 feet of anyone, much less someone (gasp!) not wearing a mask. Newspaper articles coming out daily proclaiming 'the death of NYC' or 'the new normal' or 'the end to life as we know it'.
And yet here we are. Bars and restaurants are beginning to fully reopen. Faces are beginning to fully reopen ('So that's what the bottom of their face looks like!'). Our own capacity to be out and about in the world is reopening. And as such, everything can, all at once, feel familiar and completely unfamiliar at the same time, like remembering the details of a forgotten dream or memory or feeling those first inklings of a new love after a long period of heartache. The time is both exciting and scary. It calls us to want to both jump for joy and run in hiding.
It is the nature of human embodiment itself. We are beings that exist both in the material plane of sidewalks and skin, potholes and pimples and we are beings that live in the immaterial world of thoughts, emotions, imagination and spirit. We are called to crawl, walk, run, climb, laugh, scream, gather, parade and we are called to analyze, contemplate, judge, theorize, anticipate, isolate, brood. We are of two seemingly disparate natures, moving through ourselves and our lives like we're navigating a mine field, one of external circumstances and events and one of our own stormy thoughtscapes, hoping and praying that nothing blows up and sends us reeling into the abyss. And as much as we might seek to live constantly in a state of joyous openness or light-filled oneness at all times, the truth of the matter is that we, as embodied forms of consciousness don't, in fact, cannot.
It is the nature of nature itself. To move through various states of being and becoming, growing and decaying, opening, closing, and reopening, is the nature of life. It is how life, the material and the immaterial, exists- how it is created, how it is sustained, how it dissolves and how it re-creates into something new.
Tantric Yoga philosophy calls these states the Five Acts of the Divine, and that everything in the universe, including sidewalks, skin, memory, minefields, are all expressions of Life wanting to live itself into existence (srsti in Sanskrit), into sustenance (sthiti), into dissolution (samhara), as well as into concealment (tirodhana) and into revelation (anugraha). Life can only know itself through the experience of living, be it through a skin cell, a thought, or a sometimes pimple-prone, Oreo-loving human being- one that can laugh and cry, gather andisolate, judge and love. It needs to forget the joyful openness and light-filled oneness that it truly is in order to exist in the world. And it needs to remember the joyful openness and light-filled oneness that it truly is in order to exist beyond the world.
Our seemingly disparate natures as human beings serve not as deterrents from our true selves but as pathways. We walk through the minefields of our life events and thoughtscapes to create life and to grow it, to experience it and to express it, in any manifestation imaginable, from the smallest gesture to the largest, from a quick nod of recognition or an elbow bump to a full bodily embrace. And when we are given a glimpse of what lies beyond the minefields, when we finally have the opportunity to take our masks off, be they in the form of N-95's, clothes, jobs, or personalities, when life reopens and reveals itself anew, then we can fully see and remember that we are in fact that light-filled oneness and joyful openness that we seek.