Some days you just can’t see the light even if it was shining right in your eyes. I try to remind myself on those days to think positive, to find the positive in everything I see, hear and feel. It doesn’t always work. Some days I can feel myself sinking, deeper and deeper into a black hole.
During those times, I try to remind myself to stand back and look logically at why I’m sinking. Is it so horrible if I just accept the blackness and let it envelop me? Sometimes it’s not as long as my thoughts contain no harm or maliciousness.
There are times when you have to accept the blackness and let it help you, guide you, teach you.
We wait and look forward to the night of the full moon. Some people I know, that’s their focus. But the night of the new moon, the dark moon, the night of black, that’s just as powerful (as we all know). We praise the Goddess in all the beauty in her fullness, whiteness, with her silver streaming down on us. We should praise her in her dark stage. When she’s quiet and sleeps. She is reflective then, looking inward allowing her to see herself from within.
I forget this sometimes. I, too, look forward to the light, and not as excited about the dark. This is evident as you scroll through the thousands of pictures that seem to plague my phone (I have the hardest time clearing all the pictures I take with my iPhone), and you will see many pictures of the fullness of the Moon Goddess when she rises and just before she crests down the other side of the hillside before she slumbers for my day. I am a Cancer, a child of this moon.
This month though, my month of no resolutions, my month of “I will do my best”, through new trials that are coming at me and old ones rearing their ugly head, I have noticed that I have become more introspective. The closer the New Moon comes, the more and more introflective I have become. Ok, I know that’s not a word, but it’s my word for how I feel. It’s not just being reflective or introspective; it’s a combination of both of them. I have begun to see or envision the Goddess as sinking into her own blackness, cloaking herself, fighting her own unseen demons. Yet after a night or two she will begin to shine beautifully again, and her light will to grow and become brighter.
I have been looking into my past, what I have enjoyed over my years of research and learning. What I have disliked as well. I have been finding that I love my spiritual path, I love my research and the classes that I pick up along the way, and I need to continue along this path. I am learning to be more positive in the dark times of my life instead of agreeing that this is my fate, that this is what I am meant to receive. None of that is true. What these times are teaching me are to find my inner strength and my inner core of hope. Helping me to become more inventive and look past that evil goblin that use to sit at the top of the well I would sink into and laugh at me. He now is becoming a small ant of a creature that sometimes wears a green hat and dances.
I have forgotten to remember what I have learned, that the blackness is cyclic that it is a time for reflection, a time for rest, a time for learning, observation, peace and quiet. And after this time I should take in all that I have observed or learned and feel renewed. Then I can let my light shine brighter, cleaner, and purer.
Sometimes the lessons are not complete or finished, but they are a building block to making me a better, stronger woman. Sometimes I don’t understand the lessons that are given me. This can be very frustrating, these non-understandable incomplete lessons. And the odds of my remembering them come the next month to try to fit these puzzle pieces together. I know, I should write them down and start a journal. I have so many journals lying around my house. A couple of them had turned into drawing tablets for the girls. And with all this new technology I could have an electronic journal. I do, I have a Samsung tablet that I love, unfortunately so do other people in my house. My iPhone is nearly out of memory space and although I can voice record on it, any free time I’m usually talking on it to my husband. (I had mentioned in a past post how crazy busy our lives are, and whenever we get a chance to talk, we talk.) All this combined makes it difficult for me to keep notes. I can start journaling at work, but that wouldn’t be ethical, and since it would be on the company computer, it wouldn’t be private. (Oh, to have a job as a writer and be able to have a computer completely to myself and all the free time in the world to write!)
So, I’m left with jotting notes down here and there, and hoping that they get date stamped one way or another. I guess that this is another building block of a lesson I’m learning….journaling on a regular basis. I want to write more. It helps me in my introflection.
At one time I wrote in a journal, many years ago. We were taught in elementary school to write in diaries. Then as I wrote, I expressed my feelings, my pain, my joy and what made me laugh. I was called over by the teacher after a few days. She would read our diaries to make sure we were writing clearly. She told me that I wasn’t suppose to write my feelings down, that I was only suppose to write down the events of the day, what I ate for breakfast but not whether I liked it or not, that I went to school, how the weather was, mundane things like that. I stopped writing, in my heart. I wrote what I was told and hated every letter, every movement of the pencil on the paper. Then once I was in high school, I started to write again. I kept my journals hidden and disguised. But my mother, being very invasive, found them and read them. She became angry over a part where I wrote that she made me mad and I wrote that she was being mean towards me (I’m sure there were other memories in there but I have hidden much of that time away, locked it away in part of my mind that I don’t want to discover – it was a hard part of my life I was finding that people and ideals I had trusted weren’t to be trusted). She ripped my journals apart and threw them away. I stopped writing again. Writing has been a hurdle for me…this is my building block, this blog is slowly opening me up to trust again.
This Friday as I am sitting quietly in meditation, I will find a journal, and begin my notes, I will light a candle of all those that come across this blog post for their lessons, their building blocks. I will accept this black cloak for the night and find my strength in the morning and feel renewed.