Awake
I’ve never been a morning person. It seemed safer somehow to stay under the covers, safe and warm. My eyes would always feel so heavy, and I just wanted to go back to my dream and not face reality, every day. I loved sleeping. I still love sleeping. Yet I have a different relationship with sleep than before. I use sleep to nourish my body and explore my dreams. I relish the feeling of waking up before my alarm and being ready to go, versus the previous version of Carmen who may or may not have been known to throw an alarm clock at her mother from time to time, or cry while answering the land line, “Why are you calling sooooo early?”, and literally I was CRYING, it broke my heart. I wanted to stay asleep, didn’t they know how safe and warm and stable sleep was?
Now, I feel awake, and I question everything. I feel like maybe I’m in a dream within a dream, like Inception. There is the part of me that questions if my nightly dreams are my actual reality, and this is just a dream within that reality, or is there a larger reality even further outside of me dreaming all of this? Now as I am awake, I never want to hide within my sleep again.
I love seeing things with new eyes. I love being awake, alert, and aware. Ready to meet people in their pain, hear their story, and grow from being in contact with them.
Being awake is incredibly freeing, yet at the same time, it is incredibly terrifying. Because when you wake up, you start doing big things. You start finding your voice. You realize you were taught you were small, when in fact you are infinite (and so are they by the way). You breathe into this, you feel your light growing brighter, you feel it in the fiber of your being. And you want more, you want to take leap after leap, even if you are bounding to your potential demise. Because you can see now. You can see that these leaps mean something. These leaps are living. Living is that feeling we get when we are soaring through the sky. From below, we might appear as though we are falling to our death. What they can’t see is we all are falling. Some of us just choose to fly instead.
We have to wake up to fly though, take a look around, and choose to open our arms to the ground beneath us, surrendering to what is, letting go. The alternative is falling, eyes closed, terrified, only seeing the dark, vigorously wishing away the impending earth. It’s the same ground beneath. And waking up is scary. Waking up means facing aspects of ourselves we don’t want to face. It means doing things we think may destroy us, so we can learn that they don’t. Sometimes I want to go back to sleep, sometimes I want to just go back to seeing what I wanted to see. The problem is, once you open your eyes, your soul will not allow you to go back. Are you ready to open your eyes?
