We are in powerhouse times, my friends.
If you've been feeling like you're on a teeter-totter - irritated one minute, crying because someone did something kind the next, angry an hour later, then spilling over with enough inspiration and energy to move Mount Kilimanjaro before passing out on the couch twenty minutes later - you aren't alone.
Sensitive peeps are doing a lot of heavy lifting these days. There is a LOT happening - energetically, astrologically, on the world stage. Our shadows are coming up to play. To be seen, acknowledged, breathed with and released or integrated as a worthy part of the whole. And those shadows are little bastards. Sticky and representative of the parts of us that we mark "here be monsters" and attempt to ignore for the rest of ever.
But we can't seem to ignore them any more. (Goddamnit.)
So we do what we have to do to stay with it. Sometimes it means running as far into the woods as you can and still make it back to your car by nightfall. Sometimes it means watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on your laptop three times in a row because the rest of the season hasn't been released yet (and that's just mean). Sometimes it means eating ice cream. Sometimes it means drinking green juice.
Sometimes it means doing it right, sometimes it means doing it wrong. While we're learning that there is no right or wrong. There's just you in all your human glory. There's just us, riding this spinning world together.
The day after Trump was elected a thought jumped into my mind "This is what we've been training for." If Trump isn't the most farcical manifestation of America's shadow, I don't know what is. But this is why we've been learning how to take care of ourselves in new ways, work in new ways, see ourselves as whole rather than fractured pieces of an imperfect creature.
You are perfect and I am perfect. Even while we're dancing with our shadows and trying to stuff pieces we don't like under the rug. Especially then.
I can't say I've been blasting it out of the park. While I do feel like I've identified how I can best help in my own stuffed sea otter delivering / story sharing / unicorn wrangling way, I get paused and plagued by self doubt more often than not.
I hide behind coping mechanisms. I numb out. I isolate myself until I may as well be Gollum eating a raw fish in a cave. I may legitimately have zero friends left by the time this is all over. Thank god for the cats.
Cat in question. How can you not feel better about the world when that's happening?
So, for today all this means signing "don't get rid of net neutrality you assholes" petitions (paraphrased) while singing along with the B52s on the radio because the 80s are everywhere and pondering the feasibility of recording 13+ meditations to support all the feelings and calm the churning brain hamsters in the next week. That's the work today.
Tomorrow's work will be something else. I don't know what yet. Because plans are even more liable than ever to be tossed up into the air like confetti. But it's getting up, showing up, and doing what I can do. (Or staying in bed. That's sometimes the best you can honestly do.)