Awakening
This beautiful being, is David. Two years ago, when I met David, he was going through a process of what most people would call “Awakening”. What is Awakening? Well, it’s just a word to explain the rewiring that takes place when a person goes through massive existential collapse of their physical and spiritual selves. Awakening often comes with extensive outer-body experiences, visions, insights, symptoms of Kundalini opening, huge shifts in emotions, energy surges, and in many cases, a complete rebirth of who you are as a person. The outcome of an awakening, is a new you. It is a profound, life-shattering, and incredible process to go through. It destroys outer you, in order to make way for a deeper, more divine you, to bare itself.
So when David came to me, asking me to document his awakening through art, I was thrilled. I’d love to, I said. When he described the image he wanted to create, I was blown away, as I’d already been thinking to make a painting much like this.
Because as it turns out, on the very day David and I met, I’d had a vision of my own soul. And my vision was almost the same as David’s painting. But he didn’t know that. I didn’t tell him.
In my vision, I was dead. My soul burst out of my heart, and thrust its way far up into the sky above me. I saw it clearly. It was an enormous winged creature with flaming blue under-feathers. It was so huge I don’t know how it had squashed itself into my heart in the first place! Maybe, my heart is bigger than it looks. 😂 Maybe all of our hearts are bigger than they look! Seeing that creature burst out of my heart however, was so profound and clear in my memory, that afterwards I thought, I must paint this. And I might have just done so, and carried on my merry way, and never met David, but then… fate intervened.
On the day I met David, suddenly and without warning, my cat-sitter cancelled, and as anyone who reads my stories knows, I have a magic cat, so I freaked out. I was supposed to be flying out of the country that evening. Who would mind my cat? You can’t leave magic cats unsupervised.
Enter David.
That day, David unexpectedly got handed a tarot card saying ‘you should think about getting a cat’. How bizarre! Well, as it turns out, he had met me briefly earlier that day at an art workshop, and he saw that I was looking for someone to mind my cat. So he messaged me as I was about to leave for the airport, and asked if he could take my cat. I said yes, and then I found out that David had bizarrely moved into my old house. Which as it turns out, is the house I’d been in when I’d first got the magic cat.
That was way too many coincidences to be coincidental. I think my cat is trying to make its way home again, I told David, and thats why she picked you.
David nodded. I think you might be right.
And then, obviously, we became friends. So when David started describing his spiritual awakening to me, I knew exactly what he meant. I’d had a very similar experience, and for me, it had begun on the day I’d met this man. It was destined for me to paint David’s awakening.
In many ways, David and I have walked parallel pathways these last few years, and it is why this painting was so easy.
Some souls are easy to paint because you recognise them. You understand them. David’s is one of those.
It was only after I’d finished his painting, and named it, that David asked me, hesitatingly, if we should really call it ‘Awakening’. After all, he said, I’m not sure I’m awakened. He paused. And sometimes, I’m not sure my heart is open either.
I smiled. I don’t think any of us are ‘there’ I said to him. Some days all of us are awake, and some days we are open, and some days we are all closed up and broken and shut down. But that’s why awakening is an action word. It isn’t a place to arrive. It isn’t a final destination. It is a way of being. And if this is the way of being you step into, then you are awaken-ing aren’t you?
David nodded. True, he smiled.
Awaken-ing.
The being of awake. It isn’t a place to land, or stay, it is a journey of be-ing.
I’m very grateful to have met this beautiful Soul Being. His light shines right out of my painting. Exactly how I see David.
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