The first time I knew that I missed her, I didn’t even really know her. I just knew that the ache inside me could be called by only one name. Missing. Feeling the loss of something I had not yet had; this was foreign. It is uncharted territory to call familiar one who has never been known. It is tender and vulnerable to dance around the entitlement of such a proclamation. To feel with such solidity as if I had tasted and touched and lived within the space between our bodies, when really, none of this was true.  We had no shared history, by any way of measurement. But yet I missed her. And in the center of my soul there were two words that pulsed in repetition.

I remember. I remember.  I remember.

~~~

It is true, perhaps, that we have always known. But even remembering is a process.

It is possible to miss what you have never known. For the strange to feel familiar and for the untouched lover to call you home. There are moments in life, fragments and slivers of time or touch or experience, when everything spirals into itself. All else fades. There is only what there is, and nothing more.

In those moments, our memory is returned to us, and we are awakened to what we have always known.

Perhaps it is simply this: That all of life is not a learning, but a remembering. Remembering that knowledge built into our bones, the wisdom spliced into our genes. Recognizing lovers from past lives, rediscovering truths long ago experienced, recalling lessons learned and learned and learned.

If we were born with the collective wisdom of the cosmos implanted in our being, our task is only this: to live and seek and love until we’ve removed barriers that unlock it all.

The most painful of this remembering is in the moment of unlearning.  Rejecting false truth.  Releasing embedded dogma. Clearing the things that do not serve.  It’s a harsh awakening to reject limitations long accepted as certainty. But only then can we hold to the light what we have deeply, always known.  Only then can we inhale this knowing deep into our consciousness. Only then can we call home what has always been ours.

Only then can we remember.

~~~

She knew then. As if she had always known. Although everything in her life until then had told her otherwise. Although the path ahead would be difficult and pain was inevitable.  But there it was in front of her. The memory of her own divinity. Her one true thing. She knew it as if she had always known.  As if her entire purpose in life had been to find her way back to this space. There was fire ahead. A burning down and a rising from the ashes. There would be collateral damage, guaranteed.  But she was ready. She remembered how to spread her wings. She had rediscovered a long missing part of her heart.  She answered the call of her memory. Nothing could ever be the same again.

~~~

We live by accumulation. Stockpiling lessons and truths and relationships and labels. We gather them tightly and hold them possessively, give them the responsibility for our continued safe passage. As if what has already been can guarantee safety and stability for what is to come. As if protection is found in what is owned and completed and understood. We ground ourselves in limitations and say thank you to all that keeps us locked in our patterns of forgetting the truths of our birth and our beings.

How often we are wrong.

How often we only meet ourselves in the midst of a great storm. When the wind has ripped us from the moorings of all that has been. When we are stumbling and ungraceful and foolishly unknowing.  It’s in the center of the worst that we come to the root of what is. To the place where things can become. To the spaces and people who can deliver us back to our memories.

It takes a long, hard fall to find the solid ground that will support our inevitable rise.

But rising requires memory, and it is memory we find when all else is stripped away. It is memory that exists when the logical mind has been silenced. It is memory to which we are delivered most often when life has brought us to our knees.

Listen. Do you hear that? It is the song of your spirit. It is the howl of your wild. It is the truth of your bones, wisdom born in you. It is the words that have been waiting to be spoken aloud. It is the fire burning in your gut. It is the lover you have not yet met, but have always somehow known, calling you home.

It is your memory. It has been with you always, and will never leave. You carry it nestled deep, safe at the very molten core of you.

Be still now, love. Find a quiet place, and let the universe blanket you with peace. Turn your palms up in welcome, raise your face to the sun. Say thank you to all that has brought you to this place.

It is time to remember.

~~~~~
And then, finally, we were together.  And in the space of that first meeting lived the energy of a thousand years and lives and loves too numerous to count. This memory pulsed in the air between us; a living, breathing entity that demanded reverence. It floated in the air, tingled on the surface of our skin, burned low in the center of our longing. If you had been there, a silent witness to this moment, you would have seen not just two people. Instead, you would have seen how such a love had cracked open a collective memory, and released the love of a thousands souls who had gone before, and a thousand more who had yet to become. And in our first kiss we were flooded with all of this, and with a holy gratitude.  

We had remembered.