Self-Love and the Big Bang

My friend had been reading about the Big Bang, and she was excited. “It was just like a seed,” she said, “this little thing, and then one day, for some crazy reason, it exploded into everything we know, the whole universe.” She looked at her tightly fisted hand, and then flung it open into a star. “Boom!”

I’d been thinking a lot about seeds because I had the feeling I was one. For the past year I’d been thinking of myself as a Mexican jumping bean, a little seed creature fighting against its shell, keeping it moving, keeping it unpredictable. I had the internal workings of an adoptee and the shell of a person out in the world, and I, too, was always on the move, unpredictable, bouncing up against myself in the search for freedom, in the search for self.

Then I met another adoptee and what I saw when I looked at her was a star. As someone who started practicing yoga eighteen years ago, I’ve heard plenty of teachers talk about how we are made of the same stuff as the stars as they talked us into various shapes or into the final resting pose, and while I loved the idea, I never actually saw a person as a star. (There was the time I was in an elevator with William Hurt and thought he was a homeless guy, but, as we know, that is not the kind of star I am talking about.) Even though she was adopted, even though she had her own issues because of abandonment and loss, this person was so luminous, her energy so hers, that something clicked in my brain and the shell I’d been carrying around forever dropped away, and all that was left was the seed of myself. I didn’t need to hide my discomfort or my strangeness or the essence of who I was. I just was.

So I walked around feeling like the seed for some time, and it felt good, lighter, clean. (I know it’s a little worm that’s inside a Mexican jumping bean, but in my mind it’s a seed, so, please, play along with me.)

But when my friend told me about the Big Bang, I started thinking, What if we are all seeds, all compact fists of potential. And what if we don’t have to do anything? What if we don’t have to go out into the world and do the big bang? What if we just walk around in the seeds of who we are and feel our life force?

Think of all the gas money that might save. We don’t have to run around and prove ourselves day after day. We could stay at home (okay, not all the time, but you know…more) and just feel how great it is to be alive without the need to prove anything to anyone.

I keep looking for ways to ease the discomfort of living as an adopted person, in an adopted person’s body, with an adopted person’s abdominal issues, housing an adopted person’s brain with the fire alarm (thank you for this visual, Sherrie Eldridge) going off 24/7 telling me something is terribly wrong, and imagining the seed of potential helps. I love to feel I don’t have to do anything. It’s enough just to be me, a little creature on the planet, feeling what it’s like to carry life.