Resurrection, Renewal & Rebirth

Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006 ~ Santa Fe, New Mexico

A few months ago, my ex-wife told me that our six-and-a-half-year-old daughter Guinevere had come home from school in distress. It seems everyone in her class had wanted to play a game she didn't want to play. Even as she stood her ground, she wanted to fit in, to be part of the group.

"I don't want to be different," she told her mother.

"You are different," her mother replied, "and that's okay."

As her mother shared the story with me, my heart went out to this little girl who was beginning to discover her uniqueness in a culture that promotes sameness, in a world that fears, persecutes and prosecutes the very differences it claims to celebrate.

I found myself in tears during our conversation, as the little boy in me recognized himself in Guinevere.

That little boy remembered how he longed to belong as he was. Yet his experiences repeatedly demonstrated that the only safe option was to push his differences under the rug, to repress his creativity, sensitivity and intuition, to pretend he was the same as the other kids...many of whom were probably doing just what he was doing....what I was doing.

Even as the adult I have become has created space for those repressed differences to emerge, scars remain. They play out in snapshot moments of fear and insecurity, often as I move through stores on my travels, watching "normal" people shop for "normal" lives. I recognize the normalcy for the illusion that it is. Yet, in those moments, that child part of me is tired of standing apart.

I still remember my first grocery store visit after I moved into my Santa Fe casita. I was so overcome by the notion of shopping as a resident rather than as a traveler that I began to cry as I placed a bottle of olive oil in my basket. I was just so grateful to be doing something "normal" after more than a year on the road.

Last night for the first time in months, I watched TV, tuning into Monk on the USA Network. It's a quirky series that features a brilliant if eccentric private detective whose peculiarities insure that he's always an outsider.

In last night's episode, Monk goes undercover in an investment office and, for the first time in his life, fits in. The obsessiveness that has always set him apart has the opposite effect in this environment and he becomes "part of the gang."

Anyone who has lived as an outsider could easily identify with Monk's childlike glee at being accepted and, when that acceptance is withdrawn, the familiar pain of loneliness and rejection.

Yet there is no loneliness when we recognize that we're all one (al-one) in our individuality. There is no rejection when we realize that we serve no one by repressing that individuality to try to fit in.

When I was growing up in Montreal, my Grade 10 Canadian history text was titled Unity in Diversity. To me, that's the perfect motto for the oneness we all claim to be seeking.

Whether you believe in the resurrection of Easter, the metaphysics of ascension or neither, it's difficult to deny that as individuals and as a human race, we are evolving into something greater.

That greatness is not about greater homogeneity.

Oneness is not about returning to some amoeba-like uniformity. Ascension is not about morphing into identical light units. Resurrection is not about a renewal of sameness.

We are rising and being reborn into a fuller expression of our individuality. That individuality is our divinity...our mastery...our humanity.

If you're looking for the perfect metaphor for oneness, look at your own body, itself a unit of oneness. Yet within that oneness are individual components — hands, feet, eyes, lungs, kidneys, veins, arteries — each of which is unlike any other. Each of which performs a vital, unique task in the functioning of the One Body.

Replacing my eyes with another set of hands would serve neither the first set of hands nor my body as a whole. That brand of uniformity would make me no safer.

It is in their differences that my individual parts fit in. It is in their diversity that they celebrate, protect and empower my unity.

That's no less true for me as an individual piece of the oneness we call America, western society, the World or the Universe.

As I prepare to leave Santa Fe on Monday for a return to my wandering ways, I am called to remember that my uniqueness is integral to human evolution and that as I accept, bless and honor my differences, I make it easier for my daughter to do the same with hers.
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I created the above drawing, titled Resurrection, Renewal & Rebirth, yesterday from the color-it-yourself activator template that forms part of my Prosper from Your Divine Purpose! program. As an individual expression of a common core, it is for me the perfect reflection of the resurrection of our divinity, the rebirth of our mastery, the renewal of our humanity.