Emotional Full Moon in Cancer

Full moon in watery, emotional Cancer, the nurturer. After many months of pandemic chaos and confusion, bruised and battered parts of your psyche need to be held close and nurtured now.

You may feel the urge to take care of family, friends, your community – the entire world. But the nurturing needs to begin with you.

Give yourself space to express any feelings you submerged or suppressed in 2020. You did what you needed to do to survive job shifts, financial insecurity, election mayhem, lockdowns and loneliness. Use this full moon time to grieve and make peace with everything that has happened to you.

Honor yourself and your journey. Take time to grieve and release the traumas and dramas of the past year. Make peace with 2020, so you can experience more joy and love and peace in the new year.

“Tears are a river that take you somewhere… somewhere better, somewhere good.
~Clarissa Pinkola Estés

💧🌙💧

Grief Work

If you come as softly
As wind within the trees
You may hear what I hear
See what sorrow sees.
If you come as lightly
As threading dew
I will take you gladly
Nor ask more of you.
You may sit beside me
Silent as a breath
Only those who stay dead
Shall remember death.
And if you come I will be silent
Nor speak harsh words to you.
I will not ask you why, now.
Or how, or what you do.
We shall sit here, softly
Beneath two different years
And the rich earth between us
Shall drink our tears.

~Audre Lorde

Let Your Tears Flow

Myths are ancient wisdom stories that can teach us how to navigate life. In one Egyptian myth, the Goddess Isis weeps and weeps in grief for what she has lost. And her tears bring balance to the land; her tears nourish the earth and the barren soil heals and becomes fertile.

Could it be that the grief we are feeling right now is a healing balm? Might our tears be the medicine that our country and our Earth need to heal?

Let your tears flow. They may heal more than your heart. 💗

~~~

Image: Sasha Wolf/Wikimedia Commons

Flooded

Flooded
Flooded St. Vrain

One broken day
When old hurts break free
From my deepest dark
Held silent too long.
 
Watery flow
A thousand tiny teardrops
Flood from every pore  
Pain long hidden.
 
This deluge
blots out sun and moon
Leaving only darkness
In its wake.
 
I wander
Stumbling over the bones
Of old memory
Dreaming of peace.
 
And slowly
The cloudy waters subside
I surface to find
A fresh, beautiful space.
 
I am new
A raw space of possibility
Old sorrows washed clean
Ready to receive.
☾ ☽

Dancing with Dad

My Dad in his 20's
My Dad in his 20’s

My dad passed away a month ago. He had struggled to hang on and stay here long past the point of misery, so his passing was a relief in many ways. But there are still days when I have images of him in my head all day, and I miss him a lot. And other days I don’t think of him at all. Grief is a strange beast.

This morning I remembered a time many years ago when my dad tried to teach me how to jitterbug. Tried is the operative word here – I never could hold my torso still and get my feet to do what his were doing so perfectly. In my defense, I am not known for my coordination. Besides, I had a glass of wine before the dance instruction began!

Dad loved to tell people the tale of how his Navy buddy taught him to jitterbug. I always loved that story;  Dad had joined the Navy at 18 and shipped out to California for basic training just as WWII ended.  He went from a tiny town in southern Illinois to suddenly being in the Navy on a ship with hundreds of other guys. I imagine that it was all quite a shock for a young geeky country boy. One of his older shipmates took my dad under his wing. He helped my dad settle in to life in the Navy. And he also taught Dad how to jitterbug so he could impress the ladies.

I love the image of my skinny 18 year old Dad with his baby face, dressed in baggy jeans and a work shirt, dancing the jitterbug with some big beefy guy in the tightly cramped quarters of a battleship! LOL  Life truly is stranger than fiction. The dance lessons definitely paid off  because  40 years later my dad was still an amazing jitterbugger.   🙂

I miss Dad. I wish I had danced with him more. This morning, as I flashed on images of the handful of times that we danced together,   I heard Dad’s voice in my ear. He said, “We’ll dance again.” And I suddenly saw an image of two energies dancing and flowing together and then apart, together and then apart. And as the energies danced, they morphed and changed shape, but I could tell that it was still the energy of Dad and I dancing together.

I think that image of my energy dance with Dad is actually a great lesson about the rhythm of life and death. We are energies that come together to dance on Earth, then part in death. Then we will come together again in a new place and dance a new dance. Over and over, we dance together in one form or another.

Later in the morning, I hike up one of my favorite trails, still thinking about my dad and missing him. I stop on a mesa to rest awhile. As I sit under the pines writing,  I am startled by a hawk’s cry above me. I look up and see two hawks soaring and spiraling just above my rocky perch. The hawks appear to be dancing together on the wind. It’s a beautiful dance,.

Another memory surfaces as I watch the hawks;  I flash on the image of my dad dancing with my mom.  In my memory, they are both in their late sixties and have been together for over 40 years. When they danced together, they were so closely in synch that it was like watching a single body move and flow to the music.

The hawks are gone when I next look up from my writing. But a pair of young deer soon stumble upon me. They freeze for a moment. But when they realize that I wont harm them, they relax and forage for food a few feet behind me.  Life dances on all around me.

I love you Dad. And I miss you. I miss your wide open country boy smile. I miss your stories. I just plain miss you!  But I know in my heart it was time for you to move on.  And I am ok –  I know that you and I will dance together again soon.