I Miss You

Covenant:

• The promise made by God to humanity and the relationship it establishes, as described in the Bible.

• The agreement between God and the ancient Israelites, in which God promised to protect them if they keep His law and were faithful to Him.

• A binding agreement.

• To enter into a covenant.

The date of publish for this piece is October 18th, 2023. An interesting time to be sharing this, but off the bat I want to say, this piece is not about politics.

Covenant is a heavy word and I haven’t spent too much time unpacking it, to be honest. I’m sure most of you haven’t. It’s not a common idea these days, especially outside of Judaism. Entering into such a pact with God might be a little confusing. I didn’t read the fine print when I signed my life to AT&T, and I would expect God to play by much fairer rules—I might not question the perimeters too much. I also imagine it would be different than signing a pact with the Devil. With the Devil I would expect some language deception and would hopefully take a little more care when perusing the document. Also, usually one makes an agreement with the aforementioned darkness-dweller when one is concurrently in a dark place…or at least with some curious leanings towards conduct that is outside the conventional status quo. But even still, the Devil isn’t really “evil” per se.. he’s gotten a lot of bad press but really he’s more akin to a trickster. People don’t like the trickster because it means they are going to get pushed into…changing—that dreaded word.

But really, who among us is walking the path of God? Any takers? Cause I am, and I know I’m not alone. Somehow God got this reputation of being all benevolent and kind and roses and light and shit. But really, are you walking the path of God? This shit is fucking hard!!! What pretty young thing began spreading this inaccurate gospel that healing and God and growth could be captured in a well-filtered instagram post? That looks like the “Devil” to me. Who is photographing the ugly cries? Cause seriously, the path of God, the pact with God, is righteous and painful indeed.

But not all the time.

I want to set the record straight: if you are seriously walking a spiritual path than you will find yourself crawaling bloody on your hands and knees every so often. That is finding God. But not all the time. Just every once and a while. Most of us have been conditioned towards separation-consciousness: the belief that we are not apart of the fabric of the entire universe. Undoing conditioning of any kind can be a death, can be extremely painful. But also, totally worth it in the end. (Undoing racism? Totally worth it no matter how painful it might feel going in). It really makes we wonder why we have separated these two giant archetypes, God and the Devil, light and dark. Kali and Quan Yin (though from different lineages) sit comfortably in the world of the Goddess because the sacred Mother does not get to be pinned down into easily digestible notions of good and evil. Kali and Quan Yin are pals, no doubt. You can’t separate this paradigm of rough and gentle. Water nourishes us, water destroys us. Fire feeds us, fire burns us. Earth holds us, earth swallows us. Air breathes us, air suffocates us.

Perhaps we are born into this pact because once we incarnate as human we are agreeing to experience the whims of life. We get no choice in how this whole things pans out. You are human, I presume, because you are reading this, and because you are human you only get so much say in the matter of how this whole life things goes. But you do have choice in how you contextualize your experiences. So, we enter this world as humans and for that reason alone we have made some kind of agreement with life/God/Devil.

We are also making agreements with other humans, spoken or not, because humans are also part God. Each one of us is sacred beyond compare. This does not make us a god, or the god. It just makes us part of the same web of connected magic. We bump into each other for longer or shorter periods of time but we are ultimately on our own pilgrimage through life, connecting to God, moving through spiritual growth, and walking each other home. The agreement, as I see it, is to keep walking, keep trusting, keep surrendering into the sometimes abysmal fear of human existence.

What a blessings. Truly.

When my brother was born my parents named him Cove. When I was born five years later I was named Tann. Covenant. Nant. Tann. Cove and Tann. We are a covenant. But for what I have no idea. I don’t know how to unpack the 15 years of radio silence with this kind of namesake lineage between us. It’s his birthday today, 46, and I haven’t seen him since he was 31. It’s a hell of a thing to be estranged from someone like this. Is he well? Is he miserable? What does he look like now? Does he have kids? Is he alive? Will I find out if he dies?

It’s called invisible grief when someone disappears but you don’t know what happened to them. It was originally coined to talk about the grief surrounding Alzheimer patients. The families have the physical person still but the personality is altered. And estrangement is the same. Will I see Cove again someday? It’s hard to know what to do with the pain of this loss because you can’t quite attach it anywhere. There is no grave to visit, no memorial to have, no community gathering to support it. I’m sure there are plenty of others who understand this experience but it’s just so so completely different than a physical death. For a long time I thought he disappeared because I was a terrible person: even my own brother wanted nothing to do with me. It’s taken a lot of years and a lot of tears to recognize that I am not responsible for his pain or his actions. It’s also taken a long time for the grief to settle in because his absence was so subtle, in a way. Is he going to respond to this email? How about this one?

I just don’t really know how to unpack this pact. It’s all symbol and mythology anyway. Underneath the whole thing I can simple say: this is just another opportunity to loosen my grip on what good and bad experiences are; this is just another opportunity to grow from the ashes of pain; this is just another random act of change along aside a universe of change. And all these things are “true” and well and satisfying. But I also like to play in the stories sometimes, because that is all life is anyway: stories. Sometimes we get to pretend the stories are real, and sometimes we cling to stories that take us places we no longer wish to go. The story of my brother and I is so complex. He wasn’t particularly kind to me growing up. But that ultimately wasn’t his fault. Three times in my life I thought he was trying to kill me. But that was the Devil, if you will.

Really the story is that we both experienced a lot of hurt and he choice to get as far away from the source of that memory pain as possible.

I could get lost in these negative stories, and trust me, I did, for a long time. But they don’t serve me any longer. What serves me now is forgiveness and my love for him. I really miss him. What serves me now is to recognize how he has served my spiritual life. In 15 years the only thing that has changed is my perception of him. He has stayed the “same.” I recognize my growth in the negative spaces of his presence. Each year he is silent the pain of his loss hurts more, not less. Not less by a long shot. I take this as a win because I see my heart growing bigger and wider and encompassing more. Or I should say, I see my heart emptying so that love can fill it back up. So much muck gets in the way of our hearts and the closest person to love. I empty my heart so it can be free to receive more. I don’t understand it, but in the spiritual world to empty is to be filled. I didn’t make it this way, but I’ve come to respect these principals.

So perhaps the pact I made with Cove is in finding my relationship to God. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but by and large it seems that those running towards God are also those running from pain. When you are in enough spiritual pain you seek a spiritual answer. Or I did, I’ll speak for myself. But really my choices were death or God. I couldn’t live the way I was living before, holding so many negative stories; holding so many faulty beliefs laid down by people just as hurt as myself; holding myself to impossible standards of perfection, believing it was a way towards being loved.

At the end of the day I don’t know how to wrap our tale up in conclusions or reasons. I just really miss this person. And I’m grateful I can feel that because I’m so grateful to be alive and human. We get to feel so many things!! Can we celebrate that?! I know some of those things feel pretty bad at times, but this is that pact we made when we came into this realm as sentient beings. Even the most arduous and dire of circumstance will eventually be different. Love eventually fills in those cracks. In the meantime: it’s okay to be angry at God; it’s okay if you hate the word God; it’s okay to think it’s unfair; it’s okay to not accept it right now; it’s okay to struggle and want to give up; it’s okay to call your most trusted people over and over, regaling tails of heartbreak, until the fever breaks and you can see clear again; it’s okay to feel all your feelings because they actually won’t kill you, even if it feels that way, even if you wish it would; it’s okay to be alone; it’s okay to pray; it’s okay not to pray; it’s okay to change your mind and say you’re sorry; it’s okay to not make senes of any of this because in the end it’s just a story and you create the perimeters of your own cage. None of this is personal. Open the door, surrender, you are loved whether you are aware of it or not.