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| A skull beside a single burning candle — death and dawn, silence and light — the śmaśān where surrender becomes grace. |
The Stillness After the Cry
I am no longer shouting.
The nights of rage, the desperate questions, the endless bargaining have burned themselves out.
What remains is not relief, but a strange stillness — like the quiet center of a storm.
Around me nothing has changed.
The missiles still fall.
The manipulations still pierce.
The loneliness still presses against the ribs.
The work still grinds like an unfeeling machine.
But within, something has shifted.
I am too tired to demand, too empty to protest.
And in this exhaustion, I feel Her most.
Not as sweetness, not as comfort — but as a Presence that does not leave even when everything else has fallen away.
It is here, in the ashes of what I thought I could endure, that a different kind of peace begins to breathe.
Not the peace of escape.
The peace of surrender.
The peace of lying still in Her womb of fire, even as it scorches me to the bone.
The Womb of Fire
I once thought I was being punished.
The suffocation, the endless trials, the silence when I cried for help — it all felt like cruelty.
But slowly I began to see: this was not a prison. It was a womb.
Birth is not gentle.
Birth is blood, and pressure, and the tearing apart of what once was whole.
Birth feels like death to the one being born.
And so it is with Her.
She is not the mother of comfort, but the mother of fire.
She does not cradle me in safety — She consumes me in order to bring me forth.
She strips me of every illusion, every false refuge, every mask I once thought I needed.
At times it feels like I am a child in Her hands.
She gives me a toy — a promise of sweetness, a moment of rest — and just as I begin to hold it close, She takes it away.
Another one appears, and again it vanishes.
I cry, I protest, I clutch at emptiness.
But the lesson is mercilessly clear: nothing here is mine to keep.
Even joy is lent only long enough to be surrendered.
Other times I feel less like a child, more like a machine.
Like that liquid-metal villain T-1000 in Terminator 2 — blown apart, frozen, shattered — yet always trying to reform its shape.
That is how my ego behaves.
Each time a mask is stripped away, I scramble to build another.
Another face to show the world.
Another shield to convince myself I can still endure.
But She never lets me rest.
She strikes again, melting, tearing, breaking, until no identity holds.
And I see now: this endless cycle will not stop until I fall fully into the furnace.
Like that machine in the film, still thrashing to the last moment, until finally it sank into molten iron and dissolved.
So it is with me.
Only when I am submerged in Her fire — when no mask can re-form, when no toy can be grasped — only then does the struggle cease.
I am not asked to be strong.
I am asked to be undone.
To let the skin of the old self crack, no matter how it burns.
To let the suffocation teach me that even breath is not mine, but Hers.
And though I tremble, though I sometimes curse the very Love I once adored — I cannot deny it.
This furnace is Her womb.
This breaking is Her embrace.
This death is already the beginning of life.
The Cross as Mirror
When I look to Christ, I no longer see someone suffering instead of me.
I see someone walking the same path that every soul must walk if it longs for true rebirth.
His cross was not only a sacrifice — it was a map.
The Gospel of Matthew describes the moment with stark simplicity:
“And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
(Matthew 27:46, KJV)
This was not only a cry of agony.
It was the moment of deepest stripping — the collapse of every illusion, even the illusion of a God as someone outside Himself to lean upon.
There, at the ninth hour, with His body shattered and the crowd jeering, He entered the abyss where no comfort remained.
And paradoxically, it was in this abandonment that union came closest.
When he was craving for relief the most, the soldiers offered Him sour wine.
“They gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall: and when he had tasted thereof, he would not drink.”
(Matthew 27:34, KJV)
The body thirsted for mercy, but the world gave bitterness.
Even in that last human need, He was denied relief.
And still — He endured. Not by conquering, not by triumph, but by surrender.
The cross, then, is not merely: “He suffered for me.”
It is His invitation:
“You too will be brought here.
You too will cry out and hear only silence.
You too will be given vinegar when you beg for water.
And if you can remain even then — if you can let go of every mask, every illusion, every demand for sweetness — you will be closer to Me than ever before.”
This is not comfort, but initiation.
The crucifixion was not only the end of one man’s life, but the unveiling of a universal law:
there is no resurrection without a personal cross.
There is no dawn without this night.
Returning to the Womb
My path is not Golgotha.
I am not nailed to wooden beams before a crowd.
But I know the taste of His cry, I know the bitterness of His vinegar.
When everything I clung to was torn from me — when prayers felt unanswered, when silence pressed heavier than stone — I too whispered, “My God, why have You forsaken me?”
And in that echo, I felt Him close.
Not as savior rescuing me from the trial, but as companion who already walked it.
Yet for me the cross and the womb are not rivals — they meet in the same fire.
The cross shows me that no illusion survives the ninth hour.
The womb shows me that no mask survives the furnace.
Both are Her work, both are Her way of saying: “You are Mine, and only Mine.”
I no longer see this breaking as punishment.
I see it as birth.
I see it as the moment when toys are taken from the child’s hands so that he learns the toy is not the treasure.
I see it as the moment when the machine of ego melts in molten iron and can no longer rebuild itself.
This is not cruelty.
This is liberation — though it comes dressed in flames, though it tastes like vinegar on the tongue.
It is Her womb, Her cross, Her embrace.
And I am inside it still.
Not finished.
Not yet reborn.
But held in the fire that refuses to let me go back to what I was.
The Dawn as Surrender
The dawn is not the end of pain.
It is the end of illusion.
I begged for rescue.
I begged for sweetness.
I begged for even a drop of water to ease the fire.
But no rescue came.
No sweetness.
Only more stripping, more silence, more blows that felt unbearable.
And yet — this was not cruelty.
This was the last act of Love.
Because as long as I kept praying to be delivered out of it, I still believed freedom was somewhere else.
I still believed dawn was a change of sky, a shift in circumstance.
But She would not allow that lie to live.
She let everything fall away — even the last scraps of hope.
She made me stand naked in the place where no prayer is answered, no comfort given.
Because only there could I see:
the dawn is not above me.
The dawn is inside.
It begins when I stop begging for escape and whisper instead:
“If this too is You, then even the dark is sacred.”
That is surrender.
Not survival.
Not triumph.
Not even hope.
Just the willingness to die into Her completely.
No bargaining.
No halves.
No fear left to clutch.
And this is the paradox:
when I gave up asking for the night to end,
when I stopped reaching for rescue,
when I let the burning continue with no promise of relief —
the night itself began to glow.
The dawn was never far.
It was waiting inside me all along.
Hidden until the very last mask broke,
until the final thread of resistance snapped,
until there was nothing left but Her.
A Quiet Benediction
Nothing around me has changed.
And yet… something is different.
I no longer demand that the storm stop.
I no longer beg for toys to stay in my hands.
I no longer scramble to rebuild masks that will only be stripped again.
I accept the vinegar.
I accept the silence.
I accept even the feeling of abandonment as part of Her touch.
This is not resignation.
It is not despair.
It is the strange peace of surrender — the stillness of one who knows the womb is also the furnace, the cross is also the door, and even the night is already sacred.
I do not call this victory.
I do not call this enlightenment.
I call it grace.
The grace of being held in fire without being destroyed.
The grace of discovering that even here, in the ashes, I am not alone.
I am crucified in Her womb.
I am broken, but not lost.
And this quiet presence that remains — even in the dark, even in the vinegar, even in the silence —
is already the beginning of dawn.
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