“All your pain, worry, sorrow will someday apologize and confirm they were a great lie.”—Hafiz

Recently, I nearly drowned in gloom. I had an allergic reaction that sapped my strength and sent me to the couch to nurse a pained stomach for days. I had no strength, no desire to work or communicate with the world. I did only what was necessary to fulfill my responsibilities.

Before this happened I was feeling stronger and more Divinely inspired than I ever have.

What took me down?

The malaise started just days after visiting my childhood home. My mother and I went to our former ranch to see my brother and his family. A few times a year I go to the Watrous Valley in northeastern New Mexico. It is a magical place. Truly, in this life I was blessed with a stunning home.

Once a stagecoach stop on the Santa Fe Trail, it is a huge adobe hacienda surrounded by black willows. A river where blue herons nest flows nearby, and beyond, broad plains stretch like a green ocean.

And yet, as a child, within all the beauty, I experienced colossal pain.

It was a place of war—between my parents, my sister and me, and my brother. As well, my stepfather perished when he crashed a helicopter near the river. And one of my closest friends drove home from our house one night, rolled his car and died.

Though my family no longer owns the house where so much drama took place, my mother and I drove by it en route to my brother’s, which still sits on a part of the ranch.

Our day at his home was fun and easy—a lunch of salmon on the patio, accompanied by much laughter. It was the anniversary of my sister’s death, and though we did not speak of it, it was there as a tender spot among us.

On the way home, Mom and I encountered a severe accident on the highway. Wounded bodies lay on the ground—a helicopter there to lift them to a hospital. The synchronicity of the sight stunned us: at age 26, my sister died in a car accident.

And yet, when I arrived home, I was fine, for a few days, until my body collapsed.

One night while nursing my pained stomach, I felt the weight of my whole past in that house and on that land. The sadness of it seemed too large to bear. It was like a tragic novel—like Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre in its epic sorrow. In my memory the fields were dark and the house held a ghostly gloom.

In bed that night, I faced the sadness. I cried big, lumpy tears. I felt the pain deep in my belly.

I had never really questioned those memories. They were always just tragic. But this time I met them with God, who showed me the truth.

No tragedy, none at all. In one instant, the Divine lifted, like a morning fog, all the gloom.

The fighting, the death—that is just the way of the lower worlds. Back then my fellow family souls and I were simply working through our base energies. They are all about survival—fighting for life. Really, I was simply sharpening my warrior skills so that I could use them to climb into the love of the higher worlds.

No one died.

Those souls completed their mission of that particular incarnation.

Above all, I was not harmed. Because of those very days, I thrive now in the face of danger. Because of the tears I shed, I now know that I am eternal, that all the power of creation flows through me.

After this revelation, I stepped back into life with a strength I have never before known.

I have always loved the great dark stories of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. I knew Heathcliff’s despair and Jane’s fear of craziness in the attic. We all do—anyone who is driven to spirituality has walked the darkest path imaginable in order to arrive at the glowing gates of freedom.

As I write this, I am free of that darkness. Now that illusion of my past is mostly neutral—experience that brought me to where I am today: living in a world of glowing radiance lit by my Beloved inner self.

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