Seeing through the shadows

A year later, I find myself at the keyboard attempting to write a post.  I am slowly making my way out of my hermit year.  A year in grey.  A year communing with the wild one that dwells in a moistened, cool cavern.  A dip.  A smooth curve in between the valleys where water runs, but one cannot see...only feel.  I've been feeling my way through.  Trying to peer into the deepest dark, scanning for some kind of visual.  They were hard to make out so I had to enter through a slip in the rocks and TRUST.  I found my way through deep breaths, aching memories, painful decisions, moments of releasing. The refinement process pierced my 36 year old way of being, thinking, doing, and responding.  I think I am seeing through the shadows now and catching glimmers of light.  Thank you dark, thank you grey, thank you light for your rich defining medicine.

An epiphany tingled my body while witnessing my kids learn about themselves through a series of liking vs. disliking.  They will go on and on about someone, something, or some situation they may find themselves in and harp on it until they reach a place of final decision.  It can sometimes be negative.  And even in that...lies so many choices and perspectives.  I sort of laughed to myself, when I thought of how often I do this too.  There may be some of you who find this process familiar.  Are we too afraid to even look at it differently?  For example: is there another way to realize you are being judgmental without experiencing it firsthand?  I find the more I distance myself from these ideas the more I can observe a pattern or particular process from a place of wholeness.  This allows more wisdom.  So, I fumbled around with this new piece of knowing this year and had several real-life test-runs.

One of the deepest places I traveled to this past year; one that allowed my self-compassion to flood in was:

The Impermanence of My Perspectives and The Faulty Ground where Stand: My Beliefs.

Much can be rewritten or redefined at any given moment.  It's the reflection and awareness of the process that keeps me going, it keeps me afloat, it lulls me into calm and softness.  It stretches my muscles and expands my spirit.  It also kept me awake at night, showed up in my art, scraped off that old dead skin to the point of tenderness.  I must admit it did hurt a little. 

As I enter the darker places this season, I will do my best to remember the life that grows in it's darkness.  I will allow myself to feel, to miss, to grieve, to release without knowing why, to experience a good dose of loneliness as a reminder that this is not a "bad" thing that goes away with avoidance.  The cycles carry me through, like meeting a wise woman that knows the way when I'm lost in the forest.  I will meet my most softest and compassionate self and she'll hold me close and gently no matter the shades of dark.

To be sure, I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses. - Friedrich Nietzsche