Emerging : 5.9.26
I woke up this morning feeling blended and enmeshed with a part of me that is anxious and worried. She feels a heaviness and exhaustion in everything on our to-do list and just wants to ignore it all, and yet all she can think about is the to-do list and everything we didn’t get done on Monday that rolled to Tuesday, and then to Wednesday and Thursday, and now it’s Friday, and we wasted all this time, and now we’ll have to do so much today, and why can’t I be more disciplined?
In the blending, I become her, and she becomes me, and her thoughts completely take over my mind, clouding my experience of reality.
She feels impatient and irritated at first. This showed up yesterday, when I picked up my kids from school. She was so frustrated and impatient with everything, and then she got angry. And when my eldest child’s anger surfaced, fueled by her hunger just before dinner time, it was all I could do to step out of the kitchen and walk slowly through our neighborhood, before I could find my way down below the impatience and irritation and anger to the deep well of sadness within me.
This part of me feels sad and scared and worried and tired. She is so tired and so scared of all the amount of joy and presence and abundance and goodness and the spontaneously arising gratitude and reverence for the miracle that is this whole layered human experience. All that I’ve been feeling and opening my heart to more and more.
She is terrified that if we allow in all of this joy and all of this goodness, the next lesson she will be forced to learn is that it can all be taken away in an instant. Revealing the illusion she believes all of it to be. Not joyful or good at all, but a painful and cruel form of torture. As if the universe/god/life is taunting her with a seductive glowing light before taking it all away and leaving her in the dark, alone.
So she resists as much as she can. Warning me in all the ways she knows how, with worry and fear, and eventually turning to irritation and anger, and rushing and overwhelm. All the feelings we know well, which ignite an urgent fire within us and keep us from really ever relaxing into the goodness, the joy, and the effortless light.
What she doesn’t know yet is that the good stuff, the slow dinners on the back porch followed by sunset walks past the lilac bushes, the massage on a Monday morning and the Tuesday escape into the wildflowers in the Gorge, the singing and dancing, and the moments of pause and breath in the middle of it all, is what gives us the strength to keep going in the hard times. This is what expands our ability to be with it all: the goodness and the grief. This is the energetic fuel that nourishes and sustains us.
She doesn’t know yet that good does not beget bad. Hard things will happen to each and every one of us. The most painful of all, death, is a fact of life. But it is never a good reason to stop living, even if there are parts of me that believe it to be a very, very good reason.
She doesn’t realize yet that every moment I soften into the abundant miracle of living, breathing, being in this body, alive and awake to experience it all, I am weaving a golden, glowing thread of light from my heart to the endless, vast connection to everything. And as that thread of light grows stronger and brighter, it offers a guiding way back when the parts of me that don’t believe, that are skeptical and worried, that have worked so hard for so long to keep me safe in the only way they knew how, grow large inside of me and make it hard to see clearly.
Last night, I went to bed early with sadness and tears at the corners of my eyes, hoping to wake up without this part of me that seems to make things so much harder than they need to be. I woke up nine hours later, and she was still there, a weight on my heart, just wanting to be heard, embraced, and understood.
So this is where I began, giving her the very thing she has always wanted most and is only just now learning to receive.
And I will remind her again and again as long as she needs, that: I am safe. I am loved. I am enough. Joy is healing. Joy is strengthening. It is safe to feel and express joy. I am not alone and never will be, and I can trust myself to figure things out and to reach for support if and when the other shoe drops.
With all my love,
Raina
Going beyond the frame – 35mm Film
A note on imperfection, typos, & embracing run-on sentences — I am delighted to share that this piece was written without the help (or hindrance) of any artificial intelligence. My hope is that this is abundantly obvious as you read my words, dripping in run-on sentences and sprinkled with typos. It has taken me decades to have the courage to fully embrace my magical rambling dyslexic mind, and I no longer want to filter the truest expression of myself. To share our perfectly imperfect creative hearts is a true gift, one that I hope we never stop sharing with one another, no matter how seductive artificial perfection may seem. (Also, I am aware that this needs no explanation, but openly acknowledging this part of myself is deeply healing, and hopefully inspiring to others, so thank you for witnessing!)
