Bearing Witness

            I wrote this on Winter Solstice of 2004 and when i woke this morning, I felt guided to put it up on the blog. I often have no idea why, rarely know anything about the guidance I get, so I just follow it and see what happens.  At the time I wrote this, I had been deeply mindful of the imminence of Light with the Solstice happening as well as the religious holidays.  There was for me a strong  presence of the Holy Child. 
            It has been my practice for a long time to not know what anything is and to ask, to pray to be shown through direct experience rather than what my mind tells me.  This practice evokes a deep conversation with the Mystery and is one of the main things happening in our new Boulder Temple group.  When the conversation arose in the community about bearing witness I asked to be shown.  
            Last week I went with writing friends to see an exhibit of the Pulitzer Prize winning photos since 1941.  I had no idea ahead of time what an intense and powerful experience this would be.  There were many very large, mostly black and white, photos in several galleries, and each had a written description of what was happening when the picture was taken, as well as comments from the photographer about his/her experience taking the photograph.  There were a handful of light, happy photos including one of five beautiful Nigerian women hugging and jumping in ecstatic celebration as they realized they had won an Olympic bronze for running.  Amidst a sea of deeply disturbing and heart-breaking images of war, famine, assassinations, and people falling from burning buildings, I was drawn to an image of a small child in the Sudan. 
            At first I was horrified, my heart clenched, and I burst into tears.  I had to take deep, slow breaths to open my heart wider in order to keep looking, in order to keep seeing, to truly bear witness to this little girl.  The impulse to draw back was strong, but the pull to be there, to really bear witness was stronger.  I couldn’t leave.  I couldn’t look away.  I saw a tiny, skin-and-bones African child, a little girl, squatting on the dry earth, bent over with her arms extended and leaning into the earth, her face down in the dirt.  She had beads around her neck and bracelets on her tiny wrists.  Her little hand was clutching a piece of straw.  In the background were some straw huts.  About three feet behind her sat a huge, white-masked vulture looking directly at the child.  Waiting. 
            I could not take my eyes away.  I bought the book of the photos.  I felt compelled to stay with her, to let her live in my heart.  I prayed for her, for her family and people.  They starved to death or died of the diseases that run rampant from the lack of sanitation, clean water and medical treatment.  I couldn’t write a word—there were no words—until almost a week later, a week of just being with her, being with the vulture, being with myself, being with the Mystery of it.  Once again I realized that nothing is what we think it is, nothing is simply what it appears to be.        
            Through the sitting with it, opening to it, feeling what arose, doing Samyama, layers of direct experience began to unfold: the horror and pain of the fact that entire villages have been wiped out, people now, today in 2004, are dying of starvation and disease.  Why?  How can this be?  I  recognized and felt my own inner Little Girl who knows that place of utter aloneness, that place we all know way deep inside, of being on this planet alone and utterly fragile, separate and cut off from our own mother’s love, feeling totally separate from The Mother.  As I opened to this utter aloneness I could feel that place of collective separation, the point where spirit enters human form and our sense of union with Ultimate Love gets forgotten, at least obscured at times by being in a human body.  It’s an archetypal wound we carry, to some degree, and may have gotten translated as “original sin.”  
            Like this little girl, we are all trying to make our way to the “feeding station”, the place of true nourishment and connection, the place where the human experience of separation is finished.  Sometimes we know we are there, one with the Mother, sometimes we feel we will never get there and fall into deep despair.  I tuned in and could feel the world-wide suffering, the collective despair and starvation of souls at all levels.  I prayed for all the souls on the planet that feel ravaged by this life, by war, starvation, abuse, betrayal, by simply being human and having to walk this walk.  Starvation in the Sudan is no longer some fact on the news for me, and this child is not just a number among the famine victims.  I feel the devastation, the fragility and tenderness of being human, humbled by what I am given.  I feel more love flowing through my heart for having “met” this little girl.  Bearing Witness, I am discovering, is a true, deep meeting—with other, with self, and with the Mystery.
            I tuned in the vulture and have spent a lot of time with her, too.  From the place of being that child, face-down in the dirt, barely living and clearly dying, all alone, the vulture is a loving, comforting, benevolent presence for me.  I recognize Her energy.  I know this vulture, this Being, at some level already.  As the child, I feel relieved she is there, relieved not to be alone.  Death is preferable to being so ultimately alone at the edge like this.  I feel into the vulture and realize She is the Divine Mother in one of Her terrible disguises.  Her presence and love hold me. 
            My experience of the photo has now completely transformed.  Bearing witness, allowing myself to open and step into it, receive what is there beyond my thoughts about what is there, has taken me somewhere unexpected.  My mind has stopped, my heart now is flowing with love for the child and the vulture.  I feel deepened and touched by the Mystery.
            Curious about vultures, I looked it up in Alice Walker’s Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (I highly recommend this book), and discovered that the vulture is an ancient totem of the Great Goddess.  In Egypt She was called Nekhbet, the vulture-headed Mother, worshipped as the origin of all things and the guardian of the gates of death and rebirth.  Nekhbet is one of the Two Mistresses: in the east is the serpent goddess Buto who was said to bring the sun to birth; in the west, Nekhbet daily ordained death.  Nekhbet is a Kali figure, a Presence I know so well.  The Egyptian symbol for grandmother is the also the vulture goddess.  This brought another synchronicity, because the week before going to the photo exhibit, I experienced a visitation by the spirit of a beautiful Love Child, a granddaughter, not yet born.  I immediately recognized her, knew her, and was completely melted by the Love that she is, that she emanates, and evokes.  Her Light is ineffable.  Whether she will incarnate, take a body, I don’t know.  The Love she quickened in me continues to flow through me like thick golden honey.  So I have the bookends of this Child of Light and the Child of the Darkness and realize that, beyond all appearances, the Love is the same.              
            All of this has been utterly profound.  My heart feels larger, softer, more tender, and both of those little girls, as well as my own inner little girl, now rest here in my heart.  I am grateful for the gift of Bearing Witness, the revelation of the Mystery and the grace of the Mother that is always present.  I discovered once again, that everything is a portal to the Mystery, no matter what the appearance is.  What calls to us, either by attraction or revulsion, is an invitation to a conversation, a meeting, with the Mystery. 
            The last part of this story is about the 33-year-old photographer who took the photo.  He wrote that several times he chased the vulture away, and sat under a tree and cried for this child and for his own heart-breaking, gut-wrenching dilemma.  They were told not to touch any of  the famine victims because of the wide-spread diseases they carried, so he did not pick her up, though his heart cried out to.  Later when the photos were out in the world, and he won the Pulitzer, he received a lot of attack for not picking up the little girl.  Shortly after this, his best friend, also a photojournalist, was murdered, and then he took his own life.  The photo of him in the book showed a very beautiful, sensitive looking young man who had spent most of his career bearing witness to the violence and horrors in South Africa.   He also rests in my heart.  I am in awe of the mysterious ways we are connected and our lives are tied to the lives of people who, at one moment were strangers, and in the next, our beloveds.  May you feel the Holy Child in your own heart and find the Mystery in the ordinary moments of your life.