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| Everything Ends & Everything Begins Again |
This is Week 47 of my Surviving Year Two Grief Project. Details about all my Grief Projects, as well as Grief Resources can be found here.
I have really been going through it this month. This last lunation (May 25, 2017 to June 24, 2017) seemed to knock a lot of us around. The Summer Solstice jumped in there as well for extra, energetic turbulence.
The Moon and I go way back. Being a lonely, little girl, the Moon was always there for me. When I was small, I thought she followed me around and I would always look for her when I needed a friend. The first time I saw the Moon in the daytime, I thought she came out just for me.
As I grew up and connected to my nature-based spirituality, I learned about the cycles of the Moon and how connected they are to the menstrual cycle, the tides, and the seasons. When social media started getting popular, I infused my posts with wisdom about the moon blending the new world with the old. I still do. When it is the start of the New Moon, I remind everyone that everything ends and everything begins again. When it is a Full Moon, I remind everyone about the many names each particular lunation has had around the world.
In some of my darkest hours this month, the phrase "everything ends and everything begins again" has saved me. I clung to that truth, white-knuckling my way through the darkness, the suicidal feelings and the despair.
"Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness — mine, yours, ours — need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life." ~ Parker J. Palmer
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| Ritual Seed Sprouts: Week 7 |
Today, I feel like I have survived a ship wreck. I am bloodied and battered. I have crawled to shore and friends have come and soothed my burns with handmade balms and put me to bed to sleep and heal. I don't feel very good, but I don't feel lost at sea today. I know that more rough waters lie ahead and more and more I think the key to survival is knowing how to navigate those ship wrecked moments. Trying to live a life of no ship wrecks is impossible.
So as a hopeful help to you, my sweet reader, and a reminder to my future, scared, ship-wrecked self, here are some things that help me get through the darkness (and see an almost identical list in my Surviving Year Two: Week 15 post!):
- drinking water
- taking my vitamins
- eating a banana
- calling a friend who is NOT AFRAID of my darkness and can be loving and present with it
- watching a movie I love
- listening to good music and moving my body
- burying my face in a furry kitty belly
- going outside and walking barefoot
- taking a shower or a bath
- reading a good book
"I think it's the skill of living in the present that I have mastered in the last 25 years. It is the key to enjoying your life in full. Enjoying life doesn't mean being unreasonably excited all the time. On the contrary, as I became older I realized that the first step towards finding the joy of life was to accept reality openly and sincerely, accept everything as it is. Reality is not perfect. But it is important to face the truth. This attitude works wonders."Again and again, I try to return to the NOW. When I am lost in the dark place, it is always because I am grief-stricken about the past, or frightened and anxious about the future. When I can drop into the NOW, I realize that I am alive and breathing and living in my open human human heart and there is tremendous healing and vitality in that space. It can be SO HARD to find that wisdom when I feel like I am hanging on for dear life, as I am tossed and pummeled by the sea of my emotions, but I must remember to hang on and hold on. It will get better. And then it will get worse. And then it will get better again. I must learn to ride the tides like the good Moon Witch I know myself to be.
Thank you for witnessing me. See you next week.
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