The Cocoon

My year began with rip-roaring speed, pummeled with family health emergencies, death, and the inevitable dating dramas (despite our best of intentions). Even the warmer, drier temperatures this winter seem to signal the acceleration into spring. Either that, or I'm just crazy thinking that it's March or April outside.

All of this is to say that we are not even two weeks into the new year (and only a hair shy of three weeks since the solstice), and already I'm feeling a huge push towards reawakening. We've all heard the cliché: it is always the darkest before the dawn. I would challenge a rewording of this: it is often the darkest before we choose to strike the match and light the candle what was in our hand the whole time. Because it is through feeling, and feeling alone, that we remember the flame. The ache that pulls us towards recalling that there is no other way BUT to shine. And it is good.

It is SO good.

There is a very real risk in numbing, or stopping our reactions prematurely under the guise of equanimity. Let me be more specific: it is counter productive to try to rush and achieve equanimity because I think I need to be there. That is ego, because, bless her heart, my ego finds certain strong emotions, like anger, to be terrifying. My intention for the next few months is to come out of the winter cocoon as a raw and trembling being. We've all played the game, some of us more convincingly so than others, of keeping a calm face and disregarding what we feel as a way to protect ourselves. And there's no judgment to be found here, it's a survival mechanism in most cases. Instead of shedding the cocoon entirely to expose our naked, delicate (yet astoundingly resilient) selves, we punch out holes to stick our head, arms, and legs through and proclaim: “Well, I'm out!”

We are out in a way, certainly, but if that becomes the norm, the numbness becomes the norm, too. The Good Enough. The Look How Stoic and Calm I Can Be.

Newsflash: we are not statues. The last time I checked, we were very fleshy and squishy. The squeezing ache in your chest is your heart struggling to break open again, not an attempt to hold itself together using old, fraying stitches. There are many wounds in this world, just wanting to be heard.

There is nothing more lovely, nothing, no where, no when, that is more beautiful than a Being as it Is. So even as life rushes at us, demanding to be broken open, may we continue to weep, to laugh, to feel anger, and love so hard we almost shatter, taking care of ourselves along the way. If there's anything I pray for, it is that I wake up tomorrow still able to cry.

Be well, in all your stages of transformation. You are Good, Holy, and Beautiful where you are.

Namaste, lovelies!