As I sit in this new place I can feel in my body discomfort and a sense of fragility, almost pain. I am called in to feel, and what I feel, in the quiet, are the small sensations of the past alive in my skin and cells and even the air I breathe. I find myself curious: what happens if I rest here?
What I find is that by allowing myself a safe dive into my melancholy, I emerge with a verve for life, like one who taken a long swim in a cold river. When I allow myself to be sad, supported by the beauty of art and words, an alchemy is performed.
It seems quite natural to me, and not false at all, to be contemplating life at this time of year. Whether that is brought by the coming back of the light, or the shift in the number of the year, there is a natural settling of the old, a reflection on what happened and what did not, a remembering, maybe, of what I was expecting or hoping for during this time last year.
For me, I am feeling like someone who has been in the process of a large garden project for quite some time, and is just now seeing fresh beds ready for seeds, hoping that the coming season will bring growth and light weeding, but less moving of Earth.
As I look at the blank earth of my soul garden beds ready for planting, I am waiting for the inspiration to plant, and trying not to rush. Unlike an earth garden, our soul gardens can be unpredictable: seeds we thought were for one thing grow something else entirely, or the seeds we thought were so necessary turn out to not be so at all. What a soul garden shares completely with those made of physical earth is the necessity of tending. Whether gentle, mindful tending or radical, passionate tending, life thrives on attention.
It has been found that human connection is so basic, so necessary, so essential to our existence that the simple lack of it registers in the human nervous system as violence. I wonder what this means for our connection with ourselves? What does it do it to us when we disregard and disconnect from our own inner longings, feelings and desires? And what does it do when we pay attention to them? When we tend them, love them, honor them?
We are so encouraged by our culture to disconnect from the quiet longings, the disquiet, the places that may reveal these essential places of disconnection, the opportunities for healing. And it can be terrifying to go there. I'm hoping that 2019 is the year that many of us find our bravery, that we are able to be afraid of being with ourselves, with our pain, with the pain of others, but that we find the strength to go ahead and do it anyway.
