I know rock bottom well. Once you have been there, you never forget what it feels like. It is, sadly, something that comes to us all at least once per lifetime. Even if it is death.

There is total freedom when you hit it. A dark humor blasts you awake as you endure the circumstances in which it is happening.

Nothing is what it seems, nor are you. Welcome to what seemingly is and isn’t. This is paradox country.

I write a lot about people that think they are enlightened and entitled to teach. People get very angry when I do this. They want to believe so badly.

There is nothing to believe, only the rock bottom knowledge that you are both enough and not enough. Endurance happens; it cannot be explained.

Acceptance is inevitable as time rolls over and over and over until we decide it is time to pet its belly.

Then something new may happen. We become happy in our insight. It really is like going to the Humane Society and adopting a pet that needs a home.

Now we have a reason to live for we have become the Beloved of God, of ourselves. This is not sorrow but a sweet unknowing, one that Leonard Cohen speaks of. It will be allowed room in our beds. We will save our leftovers to feed it and we will take it under the covers with us. It cannot go on a talk show and speak of its enlightenment. It is beyond that. It makes us so fragile that we live in a web of wisdom with live dew drops on it.

It is us. We need homes for our aching hearts and when it is time, we will be adopted into the Great Unknowing. I have my own unknowing now. Maybe one day I will name it.

Vicki Woodyard