Monday 26 January 2015

I have a new benchmark and shall never settle for less

The stone and shell filled with the goodness we felt and shared was slid into the sea. The prayers embeded were for all that is good that we shared be multiplied in our lives. This slow unplaiting of the strands that wove us together has resulted in another tapestry slowly being woven with colours so bright, our hearts so filled and this expansiveness that is Love has grown.

My Good Friend Gerri found this and it echoed the exact process I have found myself in, and am deeply greatful to Our Higher Selves that guided us into the Ceremony of letting one another go in a forest… and planting what was old and no longer accurate…

“The culmination of one love, one dream, one self, is the anonymous seed of the next. There is very little difference between burying and planting. For often, we need to put dead things to rest, so that new life can grow. And further, the thing put to rest—whether it be a loved one, a dream, or a false way of seeing—becomes the fertilizer for the life about to form.

As the well-used thing joins with the earth, the old love fertilizes the new; the broken dream fertilizes the dream yet conceived; the painful way of being that strapped us to the world fertilizes the freer inner stance about to unfold. This is very helpful when considering the many forms of self we inhabit over a lifetime. One self carries us to the extent of its usefulness and dies.

We are then forced to put that once beloved skin to rest, to join it with the ground of spirit from which it came, so it may fertilize the next skin of self that will carry us into tomorrow. There is always grief for what is lost and always surprise at what is to be born. But much of our pain in living comes from wearing a dead and useless skin, refusing to put it to rest, or from burying such things with the intent of hiding them rather than relinquishing them.

For every new way of being, there is a failed attempt mulching beneath the tongue. For every sprig that breaks surface, there is an old stick stirring underground. For every moment of joy sprouting, there is a new moment of struggle taking root. We live, embrace, and put to rest our dearest things, including how we see ourselves, so we can resurrect our lives anew.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

We pay so much attention to beginnings, marriages, new jobs, new this new that. And in this process of letting my Beloved be Free into something that is far bigger than our relationship , her quest for self in another country that would have the right teachings for her soul… had me deeply aware of the process of honouring.

How about we all hold ceremony when we leave a country, job or Lover.

How about we do this gentleness and reverence in deep, deep thanks.

And how about we speak what did not work and set that free, and how about we speak about what was good and let it live?

And how about loving so big that it is a Free thing that is unfettered by ego?

I am also aware of the wisdom that great wounds require great healing and if this is done consciously, it will mend many things on so many levels…I am deeply sad, really grieving as if a Great Death has happened, letting go of someone that you Love unto a pathway that serves them best has been one of the most difficult things that I have done in this lifetime. It was not done alone, my Beloved also has found this painful, as we share a deep love for one another. 

Tears stream as I walk back to my home, the hill steeper than usual, heart heavier I suppose, yet, oh yet, the other side of this coin called love, gratitude and joy is equally close. We have loved well… I have a new benchmark and shall never settle for less… 

Sunday 11 January 2015

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.