Jennifer Luna Posada
November, 2016
White, like the face of the high-up moon, the new blank page presses against your heart. You mistake it first for just another pressure you can’t respond to, can’t handle. You close in on yourself further and the shell that keeps you going. You find that in its furthest corners is another way…a softer way you hadn’t seen before. You find that the new blank page isn’t pressure, but grace…
Do I have the words?…
When I left Tibet, I myself was a shell, riveted by beauty and broken in body. I had left under emergency conditions and, once back to oxygen at a fancy and clean hotel in Kathmandu with smooth lines and empty margins, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw my red eyes and wondered if anyone could tell. If anyone could see the full collapse of my fragile shape. I got a massage and while the woman touched me I cried tears into the bowl of flower petals placed beneath the face cradle on the floor. One by one they dropped into the water and onto the orange fragments of calendula sunshine. I prayed for the goddess to help me.
I think that is what we are all feeling now, in little or big ways…like what is left of broken blossoms. Like scattered petals. But haven’t you seen the path to heaven? It is strewn with flower petals too. They are a sign that we are on our right way…they are the breadcrumbs to show us the way home…to that heaven within. I do not mean that pain is the only way there. I just mean that pain has been showing many of us the way in these past weeks or months, and where we are going is the turning point.
2016 gave us so much. I spoke of 2016 as a rebirth and in so many ways it really was one. It also allowed old worlds to fall in order for that rebirth to happen. Only as this year concludes can we really see beyond the rubble of the fallen past to the shore that opened up beyond it. My best recommendation for right now, before the new year begins, is to let the dust settle…when it does things will look different than you had expected them to. You will see the new passageway opening up at that deepest place in your shell. A softer way. A journey to something new.
So climb up into your shell as much as you need to. It will lead you where you need to go.
I know. Even if you are sixteen you may have this ancient feeling that you are too old for this. Too old to start down a path for which you have not only no map, but no language, and no name. Too old to remember what paws feel like against wet earth. I know. I have seen it all myself. I have seen whole civilizations be born and fall, but I know the realms that remain untouched and that are glowing deep inside of you…waiting, ultimately only further rejuvenated by that which has felt like it harmed you most…because those things only opened you more to the wide arms of the magical where footfall and nightfall come together without words. Where stars are friends who lead you deeper, and where the moon both remembers everything about you…and sees you as entirely new.
We are about to be asked to reclaim our gifts. The ones we are afraid to remember because they are so beautiful and we hid them so well. The ones that will be like taking sunlight from a box and hanging it on the wall to illuminate everything inside of us, to clean us of everything we no longer need, and to finally show us the way that feels right. Not the way presented to us when we were twelve, or twenty or yesterday. Not the way forced upon us by necessity and gravity. The way. The way we were born. The way we come into light. The way that dark gave us and loved us through. The way of wholeness when the fragments melt back into one. The way that lets you feel strong in your muscles anew as you perch like a bird ready to fly again after letting your wings heal…the way that lets you lift one foot, and then press off with the other. The way that lets you feel the wind and forget…everything…else…
This is the turning point. When you land again you won’t be the same person. You will be the same person at your essence, you will just be more of your essence than you have ever been before…
It will start with your winter coat. No matter what season you are in right now, here on the earth we have all been wearing a metaphorical winter coat (or several) that still hid some of our radiance from the world…to the degree that we felt would allow us to carry on, and cover our pain, and fit in enough to relate to others. We’ve begun to think the coat is who we are, and how we look, and when it finally falls away like a shed skin, we will suddenly burst free with a joy we thought we’d never know. A lightness that we have craved for perhaps lifetimes. But we won’t take the coat off all of a sudden and for no reason. We will take it off because it is going to get hot.
Our glow inside will get so warm that we won’t be able to wear it anymore. We will go to the creek and wash our naked bodies and wash away all the hurt of the decades before. We will lift our heads and know ourselves while our heart beats with the earth. We will see beyond circumstances to the truth beneath them. We will feel inspired, and that inspiration will lead us into the rest of our lives.
The time of questions will fall away, and the time of knowingness will roll in like a sweet tide, lifting us up. The questions will still be there but the stream of knowing will rush over them like soft stones and they will be, answered and unanswered, loved just the same.
You won’t have to strive the same way for the same things, but you will start to want like never before. You will feel hungry when you wake up from this long sleep and the wild dreams, and thirsty…you will want to feel again and you will feel ravenous for sensation and experience again…but you will get all you need often from things as simple as the view of the sky at your window and a sip of cool water and the sound of the wind at your back.
There will still be scattered petals sometimes, but you will feel differently about them. You will add them to the sunlit path made by darkness, and the bowl of petals you need to cry into. That will be your alchemy…the way you make gold.
And you will make gold this year, in 2017. Gold like you have never known. You will take risks this year you didn’t expect to, and fall into the loving fabric of the universe as you never have before.
You will wear stars for earrings, and you will laugh again. And all of you will laugh, not just the dry place left after the flood, but all of you. So while the dust settles, climb into the best place in your shell where you fit perfectly. Fold into yourself until you make your smallest shape and notice your dreams. Soon you will see a wide sky again, and a narrow path made of light, and strewn with petals…
Love,
Jennifer
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