Beach Yourself

Be patient with sadness.

Let it come closer, let it engulf you if it must.

Until there is no division between 'self' and 'sadness'.

Until you cannot call it 'sadness' at all.

Until there is only intimacy.

Sadness keeps you soft and flexible.

It reminds you, when you have forgotten,

of the beautiful fragility underneath all things.

In the softness of the heart lies its capacity to love.

Sadness is not the opposite of joy, but its gateway.

- Jeff Foster

You get up from your bed, sleep eluding. Jeans are pulled on, T shirt thrown. You reach the gate and know that this will be something that might never be done again. The hardness of the tar beneath your feet, pebbles sure to lodge. You know this walk, you have done it a 100 times for many different reasons. By the time you get to the beach you feel the metaphor of the sand pulling at your feet with sandals in your hand. Your clothes a heap, moon the only eye seeing.

And you take the wet sand, you scrub, your hair, your face, your hands. Every inch of you is beached. And on your knees you move into the ocean. Screaming into the tide, you shout and allow yourself to lose yourself to the grief and let the madness just be let loose. Only the sentient ones who swim will know, you don’t expect benediction. On your back on the dunes, the winking stars stare, as many as the sand particles, to blurry to see, you simply let yourself be. It is dramatic yes, you are Youman, you have a vast ocean of feelings that pluck and pull as you howl your losses.

Your walk home chafes you. The shower washing what you hope will be released in sweet waters. Your bed – you sink into. Maybe your mornings walk will give you something to hang onto. And maybe you need to visit the dark nights walk a few times before you feel removed from what drove you there.

Know this - that transmutation is painful, any rebirth is a dark, painful lonely time. It is never a comfortable process when Chapters end.

Know this  - you are in a powerful time of regeneration.

And one day you will awaken with something lighter in your Being, relieved that you knew that this too shall pass, and life’s full offerings have been renewed. You have released the old, broken open into the new and can finally welcome the change as the Gift it always is.