Losing something or someone you’ve treasured is tough business. It robs of a part of your life. Yet there is also this other aspect, that losing clears out space that can be filled by something new, something yet unknown to you.
Life is the school of hard knocks, or at least it likely can be. The path can be confusing up until that point when you realize that you’ve been looking in the wrong direction all that time. And what you’ve been looking is already here in your hand.
I am sure you remember moments when something has touched you so deeply that it left a mark in you – it’s going to stay with you for the rest of your life. And for all the thinking you might do as to why that is, no doubt remains about the depth of your experience.
There is a magic about allowing yourself to let something touch you – be it a moment, a person, another being, a piece of art… Having had such an experience, the old question of „why?“ then turns into something different. Or maybe it is you who turns into someone different?
We don’t want to get a no as an answer. Or, do we? In our communication there are lots of yesses we make shine as bright as billboards on a main road. But oh so often a yes does not mean a yes, but simply avoids saying a no.
Here’s a high praise to the art of saying no, for while it may feel harsch in the moment, it opens up routes of new possibility. It get’s rid of mind-junk and allows you to focus your energy at where it’s really happening.
Problem solving is a skill, non-action seems nonsense. And yet, we can get lost in trying to solve problems by scrambling about. For some things cannot be addressed by going at them directly, they need a different path – one that requires some sort of acceptance, stepping back, letting it be and letting go. Then something might open which is beyond our control and sometimes beyond our imagination.
This is by no means a passive, fatalistic way of being in the world. Just the opposite, it is a way in which I flow with the energies and dynamics of life in a creative way. Such a way might look very different from how I am used to go about things, and that exactly might be what turns it into an exhilarating adventure. All I need to do is get out of my way
When the bubble bursts and nothing is like it was before. The world has become differently in a blink of an eye and there is no way you could go back into that old life again.
This is a poem about new beginnings and the magic of such a moment.
There is a curious thing: When I hold life very tightly, everything becomes a rather tiresome and exhausting affair. When on the other hand I hold things loosely, I may discover that things seem to come to me without me really doing a lot. This doesn’t mean I’m passive.
The way to this direction leads through most unlikely doors of which death is an essential one. The tiny deaths we have to die in our life, and sometimes ugly big ones, allow us to prepare. Facing death brings a most remarkable insight.
Following my inner calling can lead me down a most adventurous path, and part of that journey is death – not necessarily physical death, but the death of something in my life. J. R. R. Tolkien put those oracle words into the mouth of Gandalf, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
Such a quest for your inner calling frequently leads to desperate moments in which I question everything and have a sense of being completely lost, in which I feel like a complete failure. This ”dark night of the soul”, as the Christian mystic John of the Cross has put it, seems to be a necessary passageway on this journey to that fertile land of which my longing informs me. Nothing for the faint of heart! But, oh my, how very worth it is the trip, once you’ve arrived, and how so very much worth it do those dark moments feel in hindsight. So, come on, put all your chips on the table and come on board …
What carries me through a personal crisis? Those moments, in which I am loosing familiar faces, places – really, loosing my home in the world. With no idea what’s next and how to move on. Disruptive moments can be scary, gut-wrenching, heart-wrenching.
Yet hidden in them lies, albeit often invisible, already this new life of mine. While everything inside of me wants to cling to my old ways, through a personal crisis life is asking me very unapologetically to come to it differently. As I turn towards this dark that has come upon me, there is a chance to discover something in this gloomy doom, a hidden treasure. Diamonds are made in intense pressure. And this moment of dark will pass, too. After all, new moon is the beginning of a new cycle. This is what transmutation is all about.
There are forces in this world, so utterly destructive, they leave a seemingly endless trail of traumatized victims behind. Yet, there is also a magic that can happen, where the hurtful grain of sand turns into a pearl and we develop into the wounded healers. That’s when dark turns into light and the path of life continues. Surely we’re not leaving the world to darkness, not our own world, not the world at large. We fight for the Light! We’re the Crippled Army!
We all want to meet the bliss of enlightenment. The path to it, though, which we call life, is rarely that simple. Generally, it is not straight, but full of contradictions and what seems to be dead ends and detours. It may lead us through tough places, but it is so worth it to continue on and to not run away from this darkness, for eventually it will lead us to where we so long to be.
The way out, liberation, is, really, to realize that everything has been there all along, to make my peace with it.