Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

If I could let you go as trees let go

Their leaves, so casually, one by one,

If I can come to know what they do know,

That fall is the release, the consummation,

Then fear of time and the uncertain fruit

Would not distemper the great lucid skies

This strangest autumn, mellow and acute.

If I can take the dark with open eyes

and call it seasonal, not harsh or strange

(For love itself may need a time of sleep),

And, treelike, stand unmoved before the change,

Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,

The strong root still alive under the snow,

Love will endure — if I can let you go.

– Mae Sarton

I’ve been picking rosehips…

What else can I do?  Clearly the time for letting go has come, though the sun still blazes hot against my skin and everything else is still on fire from its touch too…there is no doubt.  The beautiful wild rosebuds of summer are gone.  And I am not sorry.  They have left behind their richest gift.  They have become something new…a form that holds all the secrets of all that has passed since they emerged in the spring as something soft and pink and fresh.  They have become what holds the treasure, and they carry the new seeds.  They remind me, as I surrender like everything in nature is beginning to until it seems that only bare branches will remain in my heart…of hope.

They seem, the rosehips, to explode from the landscape with their passionate red.  They have no shame…why should they?  They have known summer…

As the fall equinox arose the energies were literally dizzying and hard often to bear.  The pitch would intensify, and then soften as a new pressure would start to build like a hurricane you can see coming from the distance.  This is the story of our times, but the week or so before and after equinoxes and solstices can be especially intense, and this one was no exception.  Many people felt physically unwell, with old stressors and issues returning in the body.  Others felt emotionally pressed right up against it…triggered at every turn and flaring up over what might have usually felt small.  Leading up to this equinox was like trying to crawl through a tunnel that got smaller and smaller.  And because it has just passed it is as if we are still in the tightest of spots…but at least now we are climbing out and it gets wider again as we go.  And as we finally exit the passage, we will be in a new place…within ourselves and in our lives.  For equinoxes and solstices are portals of transformation, always powerful.

So while again things are stripped away…things I may not feel ready to let go of, or wish I could understand before I do…I pick rosehips.  For they remind me that the greatest beauty always lays ahead.  They speak to me of the ripeness and fruition that only letting go brings.   They whisper of the secrets that only seeds know…and won’t tell.  We have to be there when they reveal themselves.  We have to be there for their becoming.  We have to know that every part of the cycle, every season, is a part of that becoming.  They are all the bearers of the fruit.

So it is harvest time.  And I am letting go of all the fruit I bore from spring’s first glimmers in my heart.  I am letting go of all the wishes and the wants and the hopes.  I am letting them fly.  The fruits are falling everywhere…some tasted, some never reached…but never the last.

There will be more, if we let go of whatever we are holding on to.  Life will surprise us…always.  And we will feel lighter again, even as the light is decreasing.  And we will walk barefooted, and with empty, open hands.

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

I’m upstairs in my room…the sunlight is streaming in and I’ve spent the last hour or so playing a new song I really like, singing along, and dancing around…over and over again.  And it’s amazing.  It’s amazing how much it feels like not only a balm to the soul, but a seal of protection…driving any darknesses far away, or pulling the ones from my heart and making them into beautiful new shapes.  I looked up the chords to the song online and started playing it on my guitar, and then I pulled out the old typewriter I just started using and let a poem come out of me…

This…this is one of the most powerful forms of sound healing I have ever known.  It’s the miracle of music or sound bringing you back to yourself, and really that is the truest power of healing in whatever form it comes…singing, writing, dancing, painting, making love, walking out under the sky, a long drive to nowhere in particular, a new place to see, a new way to see yourself…the gifts of life are the things that give you back to yourself, over and over again.  This is remembering.  This is what then lets you give yourself to others, or to anything you want to give yourself to.  And giving yourself as deeply as you want to, without ever having to give yourself away, is the sweetest feeling I have ever known.

Once we learn to capture the glimmers of gold…the special things that somehow pull us inside, and then inside-out, and how to give over to them (like me playing the same song over and over again for an hour and letting it lead me, and simply not worrying about all the other things I could be doing…) life starts to be sweeter than it ever has been.  You get the feeling of being in love, and no matter how many people this may or may not extend to…it extends to yourself…you are in love with being you.  And you can get there even on the worst days, if you just know how to see that gold wherever it is hiding…or to have the deep-soul strength and faith to wait when it isn’t showing up at all.

I used to write a lot of poetry.  I started when I was little and kept up until my early twenties, and then, suddenly…it got quiet.  Don’t get me wrong.  I write all the time…here, in my journal, songs, and so much more.  But the poetry that seemed to feed my soul which starved for a depth that complete sentences rarely captured was waiting on something…so I waited too.  And then my love gave me one of his antique typewriters…and suddenly something freed up in me.  Full of errors and inconsistencies, ink that fades and intensifies in waves…I found that voice again.  The one of so many in me that I adore, and that I missed.

Sometimes I get wrapped up in being outside of my element, without even knowing it.  I am just “making do”…just coping.  And then I get into the woods, or near the ocean.  And I suddenly breathe again.  I hadn’t even known I was holding it back.  The other day was one of those even-more-magical than usual days.  I knew I had to go to the woods, and when I did I was enveloped in a rare light, and everything was on fire with itself…lit from within.  And I was walking across mossy rocks in my bare feet, and the trees were all speaking wordlessly at the same time, and my body suddenly made sense again here on this planet.  I was the forest…I am the ocean.

download Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders I recently spent a week in the city, and though I am so glad I did because it was an incredible time, the very best part of it all was coming back home.  It was a fresh start, and a new perspective.  And there is almost nothing like a new perspective.  It comes with a liberation…and sometimes even a freedom that makes you believe that the burdens of lifetimes can, and will, someday have fully fallen from your heart.  It lets you know that you are not the many things that have been weighing on you.  You are what is beneath them.  You are what is beneath everything, and like the flowers that grow through the thinnest cracks in concrete, you too will burst forward with your heart-stopping beauty in every possible space…until finally, your radiant soul will overtake anything that dares to try to hold it back.  That’s just who you are.

I know about the days that it feels like all we’ve done is push our tender heads against the concrete without moving it all.  And all you can feel is the headache and your heart can’t even speak.  But it only gets that bad when it is just about to give way.  And the tougher and thicker the layer, the more wildly alive and blooming what overcomes it in you will be…and that….that beauty in you that bursts forth…it can never be held back by anything ever again…it is golden.

So if the concrete is heavy on your heart today, and you don’t know how you will ever get around it (or even how the light could get through)…turn to something that gives you back to yourself, and let it…

And if you are fresh out of ideas, find a song you really love…that makes you feel good again inside…and put it on repeat.

Love, Jennifer