So Many Doors!

First rays of morning light on these fantastic landscape roses

One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.
~Germaine Greer

Looking back over some of what's been written here in the last ten years, I am unpleasantly surprised at how many of the same issues seem to remain; body pain, soul pain, and the perennial unfulfilled dreams.

There's a wise Japanese philosophy about resilience: you fall down seven times, you get up eight. Even if you fall down one thousand times, you still get up. It's safe to say that in these last ten years there has been a lot of falling down and getting back up.

But there's also been a lot of not getting back up. For long periods of time. No choice at all but to let go into what is and let life have her way. There's wisdom here, too. The wisdom of the feminine, of the yin energy; of surrender and laying yourself on the great lap of Whomever it is you name and then just being; resting in the dark and fertile quiet, giving life time and space to create itself anew. The transformative power of the archetypal descent, the inner sojourn, which is quite often a fundamental part of the spiritual journey for women. It's gifts can be plentiful and deep; mystical and soul-filled, heart wrenching and opening.

Oh, the longing this morning. Walking at sunrise, rounding a bend and there, along a great row of landscape roses were two bushes right in the middle set aflame by the light. That started it. Then I pick up Clarissa Pinkola Estes' Women Who Run With the Wolves looking for a particular quote and I am instantly transported back~I can feel it in my body~to a time when I first met this sacred scripture and through it, the sweet reunion with my own wild and sacred woman self, and how this, too, set my world on fire.

I am tired of the back and forth, the up and down, the wake and then sleep and then wake and then sleep. I am torn between my trust in the intelligence of life to deliver me where I need to be and trying to force it; force my heart's desire, my dreams into being, paying good money for a course that I am now not at all sure is the right thing for me. I do this time and again, forgetting that it's so much more complicated when there is serious trauma that paints everything, when the body aches all over and is exhausted, the spirit just trying to survive; when I can't quite find and then grasp for any length of time the light, the fire.

Oh, but the roses. And the words. I've had to buy a new copy of the Wolves book because my old one is completely worn, a la Velveteen Rabbit style. But the new one doesn't have all of my underlinings and scribblings and love  woven into its pages so I haul the old one off the shelf and I fall into it like I would the arms of a cherished old friend, every cell remembering our precious time together. It takes me half an hour, holding loose pages in, trying not to break it more, but finally I find it.

If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. 

If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. 

If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.