I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.” ~William Stafford
Maggie Smith, the author, describes being a student of her own pain, all wax and feathers, magical thinking; time does these things. She repeats often in her book, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, “I am out with lanterns looking for myself.”
After feeling so tightly contained for decades of my own construction, I am unfolding, I’m not half of anything and I’m in hot pursuit of taking up as much space as needed in all the rooms I find myself inhabiting.
I no longer need to cut a hole in the air to climb into as Maggie recalls with her early loss and pain. Me too, as I’m able to inhale now, exhale and pause. Breathing in is our first action in this life and breathing out will be our last.
Remaining mindful that I can always return to my breath is a tool that I utilize daily. Breathing in calming, quieting energy and breathing out whatever desires to go, a mantra that Tosha Silver reminds me of.
When I get too far ahead of myself, cannot focus, feel as if I’m fractured into a thousand tiny pieces, if I can send my grounding cord down through the crystalline layers of the earth, hook in, and return to my breath something within shifts and often takes on a new form.
I feel like a huge garage sale where I’m putting out onto the street those aspects of myself that I don’t consciously desire to be a part of the architecture of who I am presently am and may be becoming. Perfectionism, control, shame, expectations, regret to name a few that are going for free. I really hope there are no takers and that you can just walk on by.
My patchwork parachute is ever changing its shape and colors too. As it is cross stitched from all of life’s experiences that are mine. Requiring my attention, integrating, metabolizing, sloughing off, absorbing and trusting that it can hold ALL of me as I am now.
“that my mind was a parachute that could always open in time, that I could wear my heart on my sleeve and never grow out of that shirt.
That every falling leaf is a tiny kite with a string too small to see, held by the part of me in charge of making beauty out of grief.”
(An excerpt from You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson)
I am remembering how to BE, ME.
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