Every Picture Has It's Shadows

Sometimes it's too soon to tell the blessings from the perils. What parts of the darkness were for the light. How to make severance with all that had to happen, when you're not sure why there was no easier, simpler way of getting you here to this place of unspeakable understanding, of complexity and hard-earned love. Who knows. Maybe God or the Devil understand, but not you. Not now. Not yet.

Sometimes it's just too soon to tell. Don't try. It will only exhaust you further or take you down a long road called the Illusion of Control that leads to a very unpleasant dead end cliff. Turn around. Relieve yourself of needing to know. Draw yourself a steaming bath, light a ring of candles around you, pour in the salts, turn on the most godly music you can find, and scrub away your dead skin. Watch as the old parts of you fall aside. Witness as your heart tries to speak in quiet tears. Forgive as your protective troops make their rounds to stop your sobbing, to keep you seeming strong, to keep you from falling face-first into loss. Forgive. Let it all go--the expectations and hopes and reasons why you thought you were getting in this very bath; the things you thought it would give you; the happiness you thought you would earn for your dutiful self-care. Let it go.

You do not get to decide when things will feel normal again. You do not get to determine the path or how many hills you will have to climb before you can rest. You do not dictate how healing happens.

You get to choose to show up and scrub away your dead skin. To stay in the steaming bath for four songs longer than you were comfortable with. To listen to your teachers and ask for guidance from the universe. You get to surrender. You get to see. You get to really listen. You get to pray. You get to follow.

You get to become the survivor of your story. The warrior who starts a new. The shaman who speaks in six word sentences.

You get to know that everything mattered in fucked up, unbelievable, universal, cinematic ways. You get to know that nothing was wasted.

But not right away, not without practice, not without attention or time or hope. Not without blindness... blindness and sight.