Peeling the Pomegranate

Have you ever really paid attention while coaxing the glowing red seeds of a pomegranate away from its white membrane with your fingers? I was doing that a minute ago. Each little cell was perfect as it came away in my fingers, each with its dark seed in the middle, its deep red flesh.

I was thinking – as I bit down into a mouthful of those pomegranate seeds and felt the walls of each little cell burst between my teeth, filling my mouth with its bright, sweet juice – about how yesterday I sat in a circle at an NVC retreat and looked around at 26 faces.

A week before, I’d been in that same circle and seen 26 people – some wrinkled, some not, some heavier, some thinner. Just an ordinary group of people. But yesterday I looked around that circle at one face after another, and each one was as beautiful and perfect and whole as a pomegranate seed.

As I looked at them, I thought of Persephone and her descent into Hades. During our week together I’d gotten to see each of these people go into dark places and – here’s the part I don’t get to see that often in the rest of my life – not just face those dark places, but share the journey with others. I got to see one person after another drop their masks and be completely real.

I’m still trying to work it out. In that circle yesterday when each of us had made that hero’s journey and emerged into the light (or at least emerged into the light for now), did the faces look so beautiful to me because of what I’d seen each person go through, and because I got to see their real-ness as they did so? Was it because, as one of my friends said, “Jasmine, you’ve fallen in love with these 26 people. That’s why they look so beautiful to you.”

Or was it that they had actually become more physically beautiful as their faces softened and their eyes widened through contact with their own real-ness?

I’m not sure. But what seems clear to me today is that the willingness of these 26 people to be real with others – to be connected with what makes each of us fully alive – really did make me fall in love with each of them.

This week I stepped into my fear by reading the first five pages of “My Ass (In the World)” to an audience. I think it may still become a one-woman show once I embrace my fear of acting, but that’s a project for another week! I specifically chose the person at the retreat that I thought of as the scariest, and asked him to work with me. I chose an old housemate from a list of people with whom I have unfinished emotional business, and sent her an email. I asked the retreat’s leader to work with me as a “demo,” and I sat in front of 26 people and unmasked my long-time struggle to be fully authentic in romantic relationships.

I also got inspired to face a life-long avoidance of anything that reeks of budgeting, and started to track which needs I’m trying to meet through my spending. Taking a real look at how and why I spend money promises to be deeply scary, for someone who as a kid told herself that her family was going to end up in the poorhouse and that the important thing was to reach age 14 so she could support seven people with a job at Taco Bell. (More on that next week).

One of the women at the retreat told me that each day she answers the following question in her journal: “What would I do, if the world was a friendly place?”

My question to myself today is:

What would I do, if being more real would only make me more beautiful, more connected to others, more alive? What would I do today, if I trusted that my being is like a pomegranate seed: perfect and whole just as it is?