Sistah MK Awesome
Dedicated to Sister Mary Kay Henry, OSB
July 24, 1941 – December 22, 2010
A Force Of Pure Love
WORDS
SISTAH MK AWESOME
There’s a crisp, cool breeze here this morning, scent of winter whispering in it, slanted early sunshine shimmering and dancing with the wind in the trees outside my office window, casting shadows of light and leaves inside. S’nice. Chillaxin’ and listening to groovy Musica...
I’m pretty damn sure that tuning my heart into the stream and letting the Musica float into my head is one of my most favorite things to do in all the multiverse. IS happiness, you know?
Awhile back, when I was still tormented about why it is that I can constantly hear this intricate-ever-shifting-amazing music running through mah noggin pretty much all the freakin’ time but couldn’t get any of it out of my physical throat nor cozy up to any instruments yet. I was asking the universe just... WHY, you know?
I put that question out into the IS hard that day, shot it straight as an arrow right into the Heart Of The Mystery... WHY?!?!?!
That night I had a dream. I was in Space. In this vast, infinite, brilliantly shining amphitheater. All Light and Color and drenched in the sound of Joy and Love. A thrumming, throbbing beat running beneath it all... Literally the drumbeat of the Heart Of Creation.
I was with Other Beings and We Were Singing. And I mean SINGING! The Beings I was with in that moment? Well, when not explicate in material form, we lerrrrvvvvved to help Sing the Song of Creation, our "voices" pouring in these incredible harmonies. So Much Sound. And all of it wrapped around and through that deep rhythm of the heartbeat of IS.
As I became more aware of where I was, what I was doing, what I was hearing the music crescendoed and I realized that this music was the exact same River Of Sound I hear all the time in my head here on Terra and then I woke up. And as I did I was saying out loud to my Self, "Oh well that’s why you can’t sing here yet then." And what I was thinking was that my soul was still trying to figure out how to properly drive the vocal chords of this fleshy mortal coil I’m riding about in Right Now.
Telling about the dream of the Song of Creation puts me in mind of the nuns I worked for a while back. They are Benedictine. Scientists *and* Mystics. And their hearts, minds and souls are completely open to all no matter anyone's faith or lack thereof.
These Sisters are THE REAL DEAL - Love, Compassion, Discernment incarnate. What a privilege it was to spend time with them and come to know them, understand their culture, their philosophy, and witness their deep, ancient magic.
Three times a day, every day, for more than a 100 years the Sisters have gathered in their sacred chapel to pray and sing. They pray for mercy for those souls who have asked them to plead their case before God. And they also simply sing... Making the ether ring with the Musica Of The Spheres. Harmonic waves of Power and Glory and Love and Infinite Possibility... The Song of IS.
It sounds AMAZING.
The chapel is spectacular with incredible acoustics. It was built by Old World craftsmen out of hand-hewn, blue porphyry stone, with some seriously epic art. One image in particular, The Holy Spirit is forever etched into my soul. Man, oh man, these women know What The Fuck Is Up.
The energy of the chapel, quarters, Spirit Center, gardens, kitchens, all of it, even the very dirt of the land itself for at least a mile around the monastery grounds is completely conditioned with LOVE + INTENTION... This gorgeous, spiraling, stable vortex of good juju envelopes everything.
A bunch of the Sisters are healers - Massage Therapists, Physical Therapists, Reiki Practitioners, Nurses, Craniosacral Practitioners, Master Herbalists... All the Benedictine communities have healers around. There was this time when an edict came smashing down from the all-male North American Council of Bishops declaring Reiki akin to witchcraft and forbidding any and all Sisters from practicing it, as any who did were definitely damned to Hell.
No, this was not the Dark Ages. This was around 2009-2010. And... Ummm... As If. Benedictine Sisters all over the country closed ranks. Refused to listen. They simply stopped advertising Reiki and kept right on practicing it.
I remember thinking how badass that was when it was going down. And suddenly, in this intensely real and personal way, I was transported back in time then flung fast-forward through all the ages of darkness here on Terra... Through all the times when the Light has flickered so low as to almost be extinguished. What once seemed so distant was suddenly inside my story and I witnessed nuns and monks rebelling against that darkness, determined to hold onto knowledge, literature, music, crafts, art, truth, magic... despite every attempt to destroy it.
Sometimes I think the only reason why humans still know how to make beer and wine, or read and write, is because nuns and monks in the monasteries Kept the Light of those things alive when all seemed lost.
Ahhh... now I have my MK on my mind. She and another nun, Sistah Kimmie, are two of the coolest, wisest chicas I have met on my Terra walk. They were both my colleagues in the Development Office at the monastery.
Sistah Kimmie is the one who told me, "The first step is to un-nail yourself from the cross."
And Sister Mary Kay? Well, Sistah MK Awesome was a vast column of pure, rock solid that shot straight down into the center of earth and straight up into the Infinite Forevah. She is the single most grounded Being I have met upon Terra. MK was the anchor point of the monastery. She arrived there when she was 14 years old, was prioress multiple times over the years, and just basically seemed to hold the whole shebang together with her monumental life force, humungous spirit, and unshakable GOOD-NESS.
She was my boss, mentor, friend... Gawd she saw me so clearly... All my glorious, ridiculous bullshit and the weight of all the brutal baggage I was clinging to back then and she totally loved me anyway. She helped me see my Self clearly and she helped my wounded heart really open wide to compassion and forgiveness again especially for Self.
I'll share sumthin' she said to me once that changed everything for me. We were talking about forgiveness. I was expressing my anguish and conflict over what an utter impossibility it was to forgive in the way this society teaches it - that forgiveness means you forget the wrongs and move on. I was also expressing my self-loathing that I couldn't make even one photon's worth of headway in forgetting anything and wondering if my heart was incapable of forgiving.
MK was really still for a moment. Then she smiled, one of the most beautiful, beloved smiles I have been gifted with, and in the gentlest voice of kindness she said, "We will never forget the things that hurt us. How is that possible? What we are? We will never forget anything."
And here's what I learned in the moment she said that - The Art Of Forgiveness does not lie in forgetting. It lies in transforming. It is entirely about what we do with the pain, anger, grief, sorrow, hurt when those memories come to haunt us and consume our light. We can either let them eat our soul alive or we can choose to take that darkness and sit with it, allow it, bless it, feel gratitude for what it had to show us that we needed to see, fill it with the light of LOVE, and then let it go, knowing that it will come back... Over and over and over if the wound was deep. But every time it does it is simply another beautiful, blessed opportunity to learn to Act and not React. To RISE, RISE, RISE and actually sail the waves of this ceaseless Quantum Sea with freedom and sunshine blowing through yer Being instead of sinking and drowning beneath the weight.
MK died of liver cancer about a year and a half after I started working at the Monastery. The very last time I ever saw her our team was in our monthly staff meeting. She worked and served right up to the last few days of her life.
As the group was talking about day to day business I was looking at her and she started to phase. And by that I mean she started transforming back and forth between dissolving away into this pure white light that "felt" like MK and then re-solidifying into her physical body form that "looked" like MK. Each time phasing back into matter she was more translucent, her body beginning the cycling process of breaking photonic bonds apart to set her spirit free from the gravitational pull of earth mother, mater, matter, you know?
It was an extraordinary sight that I had only ever seen once before when Zeke, my beloved border collie, was at the end of his life.
Anyway, the crazy thing was nobody else in the room saw what I could see. They just kept right on having this business meeting and the whole time, inside my head, I was screaming at them all, "STOP! LOOK! Something is happening! Don’t you see? It’s Mary Kay’s time. Stop! Touch her, love her, say anything you still need to say, right any wrongs you need to right and do it now... RIGHT NOW... ‘cuz this Sistah is leavin’ on a jet plane and she ain’t comin’ back!"
After the meeting, I walked her to the elevator that went up to the Sisters’ private chambers, holding her arm to steady her as she was having a hard time walking. I was not permitted to accompany her all the way to her room. She would not let me. At the elevator door she hugged me so close inside that astonishing white light and she told me she loved me. I held onto her for an infinite moment, wrapping my heart all around her... Just adored her, you know? Because I knew that was goodbye.
And then away she went... Crossing the threshold of that elevator, passing through a doorway that was closed to me, all alone. Just like that she was gone.
How strange it was that the last moments of our shared reality together on Terra played out as a perfect physical metaphor for the exact events occurring in the Explicate Implicate Order - a shining, burning Light Being passing between worlds, riding on up in an elevator to the sky and away out into the Cosmos.
It was Friday. After work I headed home for the weekend, and by the following Wednesday she was dead.
Her funeral. Oh gawd, her funeral... I was not prepared. I shun funerals. They are so strange to me. I prefer celebrating the life of my loved ones who are returned to spirit out under the open sky, blaze a bonfire, and dance all night, drinking and filling the multiverse with praise and glory and laughter and the songs of their earthly deeds and adventures, so that they are lifted and borne back into the IS on a huge wind of untrammeled JOY, their Story ringing loud from every mountaintop.
Let the fucking agony and sorrow come when dawn breaks on the next new day, you know? The crying is only for the ones left behind anyway.
[A hint of sea shanty style melody and some words rang in my head as I typed that ^ ... Throw my bottle in the sea, tell my stories and sing of me! Sing of me!]
Yeah, so... MK’s funeral? It was a full blown Catholic Funerary Mass in the chapel. Sisters singing with so much pain in their voices I am still surprised it didn’t shatter the stone walls into pieces. The place was packed, standing room only, and people all around outside. Thousands of souls made their pilgrimage to the monastery that day. Ahhh... This woman? Oh, how much she was loved by so many.
I sat in the chapel and melted. Head down and tears streaming so thick and fast there was no stopping them and no mopping them either. I couldn’t even try I just had to let them flow I had to give my Life Water for this woman. They poured from me collecting into a large puddle of loss on the floor between my feet.
It was the middle of winter. Frigid and a snow storm that day. After the mass most everyone left but a small group of us made the cold, desolate climb up into the rolling mountains that the monastery is nestled into, up to the Hallowed Ground where the Sisters lay the empty bodies of their dead to rest.
I will never forget it.
A Scared Rite Of Passage the Sisters had been conducting on this land, in this place, for decades upon decades. Heavy footfalls. Silence but for weeping. Fresh, dark dirt piled by a newly dug grave... That black earth a brutal contrast against the white snow billowing and drifting.
Out there in the storm as they lowered her casket down into the ground the Preacher Man intoned a prayer of intention for MK's soul and then we sang as our hearts shattered together. An old timey hymnal lifting to the sky on a wave of sorrow and gratitude and immense love.
SpaceTime/TimeSpace did some crazy shit as those vibrations hit the quantum fabric. It's hard to describe it. It was like... Oh, like it dissolved away somehow and time stopped and we were suddenly floating free outside of time.
It was Anytime, Anywhere, Anywhen upon Terra that members of a human tribe lost one of their own and came together to mourn, standing in communion, naked to the elements in total defiance of their own smallness and frailty; yet all the while filled with unshakable certainty that they were Anything But Small – not a single heart present doubting that there was something more than just this one lifetime, that we are infinite and eternal, and that we are all held close in the Heart Of The Mystery.
There was absolutely and completely only Right Here Right Now.
Ahhh... and now that’s all I can say about that. I have never really talked about it before. Broke my fucking heart. I have missed her every day since.
Once in a while Sistah MK visits in my dreams. She shows up now and then, usually when I seriously need someone to give me a loving smack upside my spiritual head. Seeing her and hearing her voice in Dream World is... Well... it just IS.
xoxox
Jax