Showing Up

And sometimes a whole day goes by and you really have nothing to say.

But you've committed to writing every day.

Sometimes it's enough just to show up

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if I have one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about these days.

And Sometimes the Dreams Are Strange

Strange dreams woke me. 

Someone gave me a gift and when I used it, it created massive explosions. And destroyed pretty much everything.

I was so shaken by the explosions it was hard to remember the details of the dream. But as the day moved on, I remembered more and more.

Yesterday my mother called me. A strange dream had awakened her. The details were easy for her to recall and she felt compelled to share it. 

When we spoke on the phone today and I told her about my dream, we shared a strange feeling of odd connection. As if the concept of Wyrd had come to life. 

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about. 


Photo: (c) 2017 Katherine Cartwright. All rights reserved.

Sometimes the Transitions are Shaky

What I remember from yesterday's annual review and new year's dreaming is the feeling that I have a good life. A beautiful life, actually.

Taking the long view, it's easy to see. When you're in the trenches of the day to day frustrations, disappointments, and challenges, it's much harder.

How do we reconcile the two in order to live our best life?

Maybe some of our difficulty comes from an underlying fear of complete collapse. What if everything falls away? Can you have a plan for that? And what if there is no plan that can meet an unforeseen circumstance?

You can't live as if the worst is going to happen. And you can't plan your life as if the worst might be your lot. If the worst is going to happen, then you meet it with courage when it comes.

Until then, you live life as if you expect to have the best life possible.

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about. 

New Moon Woman

I spent the day today relaxing into possibilities for the new year. Thinking about the year that has been and about what I might like the new year to feel like. What might be ways to shape my life so that I can feel the way I'd like to feel and do the things I'd like to do.

It was an amazing day. It's always an amazing day when I do this annual practice. 

It begins with a little angst, as I am sure that I've completely wasted the year and not accomplished a thing.

Until I do a quick inventory. I usually find that I've had a pretty amazing year and that I really love my life. Even the challenges, failures, relationship disappointments, and lost opportunities, which so so often seem to dominate my thoughts, pale when compared to the long list of accomplishments and good things I remember without even having to look at my calendar or diary. 

And knowing that there is so much more.

I think about what I loved about the year, what was hard, what I learned, what I can distill as pure essence. 

This year the essence goes something like this - 2018 was a deep dive into the YUK I had to let go of, and I did a lot of releasing. It was a time of discovery and wonder. I held my book in my hand.

That had been my intention. To hold my book in my hand. And, wow. What a lesson that has been about intention setting. I got exactly what I asked for. This year, I'm going to refine that intention to include getting my book out into the world. As it is, I've got exactly one copy, a print proof with several problems. The project is stalled because of a merger. 

Of the rest of the day, I'll say only that I'm still digesting. 

I'll let it percolate for awhile. And while it does, I discover that once again I am drawn to what living my best life might look like and stepping into that for the last three weeks of the year. To engage once again my low risk, high yield experiment.

I leave the experience of a day immersed in review and possibility feeling like I cultivated energy that has been lying dormant and reinvigorated myself around living well. I feel like I've thrown off the chains and that I am light again. 

A new moon woman. Truly.

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about.

So Breathe, Just Breathe

Hours away from new moon and I am thinking about new beginnings, new cycles, fresh new energy.

And how in the deepest, darkest part of the year, my thoughts turn to the rising light and to turning the page, to leaving an old year behind. 

And welcoming the new.

We get a preview of that as we go to bed tonight and wake up in the morning to a new lunar cycle, to observing the moon's waxing, fullness, and waning over the next month. Before we know it, the old year also will become new again and fresh new energy will capture us and widen our creative imagination.

Many of us are doing the inner work to start the new year well. For some, it is clearing and de-cluttering. For some it is dreaming and visioning. For many, it is some of both.

Here are some great questions to think about --

How do I want to feel in the new year?

What kinds of changes might I be willing to make to create that?

Even small shifts can open the way for something new.

Or perhaps we might want simply to accept what is and to be at peace with that, to not engage in self-improvement, to feel like we don't have to change anything.

If that's the case, perhaps some good questions to think about might be --

What feels good about my life right now?

What are some ways I can cultivate gratitude for what is?

What might it feel like to sink into my present circumstances and to be mindful around the present moment, the breath I'm taking right now?

Can I simply enjoy this moment?   

Early in December, I take a day to relax into some possibilities for the new year. To think about the year that has been and about what I might like the new year to feel like. What might be ways to shape my life so that I can feel the way I want to feel and do the things I might like to do.

An interesting thing happens when I do this. 

I find myself wanting to live my best life. And so I say to myself, there're only a few more weeks left in the year. What if I dedicate them to living each day mindfully, with the intention that I live each day to the fullest? I count this as a low risk, high yield experiment. Something I can take with me into the new year. 

An awareness that with mindful living, each day can indeed offer me my best life.

It's not always easy to do because we can get distracted by so many things. But I find myself during these last weeks of the year cultivating a different kind of resilience and a different kind of awareness, a different attitude around allowing myself to be expansive and freer than I usually allow myself to be at home in my daily life and work.

The temptation toward constant self-improvement can rob us of our peace. It's so easy to feel like we're not enough, that we don't do enough or achieve enough or strive enough.

I have a strange theory that if we were to relax about ourselves and our lives, if we were to live mindfully in the present moment with an awareness of how fortunate we are, if we were to be happy with what is instead of always wanting more and better, we might just begin to create without expectation. It might become natural for us to live our best life without angst and striving. 

We would be living in grace. And grace opens the way. Everything else is fear. And fear shuts us down. 

It's just that simple. And also that complicated. 

But when we close our eyes and take a deep breath or three, we glimpse another possibility.   

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about these days.

The photo was taken by a friend one new year's morning at sunset. I forget who took it or which year it was, but I keep the photo close when I am in the mindspace of expansion.

 

Nocturne

It's getting a little ridiculous.

I'll be glad for the new moon and the shift in energy. These late night lunar invitations are taking their toll on my sleep. Of course, it could be Venus. 

Last night I was up sometime after 2, after having awakened at 1:15. I shuffled into the kitchen for a drink of water and a look out the window and Venus was rising just above the treeline. 

Simply spectacular.

The moon was not due to rise for several hours, about an hour before dawn, and I had hoped to be sound asleep when she did. But I woke again around 3:30, and then sometime after 4, and again at who-knows-what-time. 

I tried not to think about the long day ahead at work. 

By the time I got up for the morning a little before 7, Venus had long been folded into the lightening sky, perhaps even obscured by cloud. Her siren song had been silenced.

As I'm writing, it's nighttime and I'm wondering if Venus will sing to me again tonight. Or will she let me sleep? 

Is there something she's trying to tell me deep in the night?

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about these days.

Light and Obscuration

The waning moon must really want me to see her moods.

I woke up a little before 4 this morning and went into the kitchen to get a drink of water. Out of my window, there in the eastern sky, the waning crescent moon was rising above the treeline. And Venus, the Morning Star, was high in the sky shining brightly.

Ribbons of cloud came to dance with Venus and the Moon and there was beautiful play between light and obscuration. I would have liked to have watched that play all night, but sleep was calling.

Not for long, though. 

I was up again sometime after 5, and the clouds had moved off and the Moon and Venus were both shining brightly in the still dark, early morning sky. 

I was mesmerized by the movement of the moon through the clouds. She never disappeared completely. There was always a faint expression of her there, even while she was obscured. There seemed to be almost a wrestling between the obscuring and the light as they vied for position.

These last weeks have been difficult, and these encounters with the moon and the Morning Star over these last pre-morning wakings have seemed like both gift and teacher. I'm writing again and drawing comics. 

The world seems a little less dark when I'm engaged with my creativity. 

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about these days.

I Open the Door and

Mostly I feel like I've come home to tie up the loose ends on a life that is ended. You know that feeling like when someone has died and you go to pack up their house and dispose of their things and move their accounts and execute their will?

That feeling.

I opened the door at midnight after flying all day and these were my thoughts. I moved through each room and, while I was glad to be home, something had changed. The next morning I noted them in my journal and commented on something else I noticed --

I'd awakened in the desert to the rosy glow of sunlight on the mountains and returned to a grey, cloudy, and cold northeastern morning.   

The contrasts were startling.

This morning

I woke early and took out the trash. 

I looked up, and there in the still dark, early morning sky I saw a beautiful waning crescent moon rising with Venus, the Morning Star. It is unseasonably warm and there are soft winds. They caught my hair and lifted it against my cheek. 

Venus has been absent from our sight for about six weeks. Her familiar presence in the darkness disappeared while she was in the beams of the sun during her retrograde period, so close to the sun we cannot see her light. 

When she sets as the Evening Star and moves into the retrograde period, she rises as the Morning Star, visible in the early morning sky until the next retrograde period, when she'll set as the Morning Star, disappear into the beams of the sun, and then rise again as the Evening Star to light the night skies. It's a familiar cycle noticed by people since ancient times. 

It may even be the origin story for the mythic Underworld and Wilderness journeys and the corresponding movements in the human soul. The times we go deep within and then return with wisdom, insight, knowledge, and new understandings. 

Last night when I was writing, my journal fell open to the day I flew home and to the poem I posted yesterday. At the top of the facing page are my thoughts upon arriving home, the feeling like I was tying up the loose ends of a life that had ended. But in the intervening days I've been pulled back into that life and its voluminous demands. I lost myself for about 40-ish days, just about the time of the Wilderness Journey. 

But seeing that wonder in the still dark, early morning sky - a rising waning crescent moon and the Morning Star, who rises in the deepest part of the night to herald the coming dawn, calls me back to myself and illuminates the movements in my own soul. Calls me back to the work of tying up the loose ends of a life that is ended. 

I left it in the desert and picked up a new one.

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about these days.

I Woke Today Feeling

Sunrise in the desert

And there's a rosy glow on the mountains

When the sun comes, it's simply light.

I woke today feeling

You've got this, girl.

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about these days.

Photo: (c) 2017 Katherine Cartwright

Threshold

I approached this threshold on my first desert hike.

I hiked out over the desert and up into the mountains to a large canyon that was dotted with oases.  

I hiked from oasis to oasis. The desert drew me, but the vision of the impossible lush green within the treacherous landscape sustained me. And drove me forward.

I remember the moment I decided finally to take the trip that had been at the edge of my vision for years.

I remember the exhilaration I felt as I passed the boundary that marked the desert.

I remember the first step into the dry, gritty landscape.

I remember reaching this threshold. Two boulders stood sentinel and dared me to be mindful of the choice I was making. 

And the air was different on the other side.

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and to writing about these days. 

Photo: (c) 2015, Katherine Cartwright