Image: Ilse Moore

“Always be like a water. Float in the times of pain or dance like waves along the wind which touches its surface.”

Santosh Kalwar

Some days I want to scream,

“I am not as strong as you think I am.”

Or perhaps,

“I am stronger than I have ever given myself credit for.”

Maybe both are true.

Strength has never been the absence of heaviness.

Some days the darkness weighs on me, too.

There are days when my own depth is too vast for even me to swim. Days when I want nothing more than to crawl into the shallows, lick my wounds, catch my breath, and pretend the ocean doesn’t know my name.

The trouble is…

I don’t know how to exist in the shallows.

Not in life.

Not in love.

Not in Magick.

I only know depth.

And water has never cared about what I find comfortable.

It asks no permission.

Shows no prejudice.

It simply becomes.

It slips through cracks, wears away mountains, carves canyons from stone. With gentleness or with violence, it reaches where it intends to go.

Water always remembers its nature.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always loved it.

On the days when the waves refuse to stop crashing, those around me inevitably seem to need me the most.

So I do what I’ve always done.

I hold space.

I listen.

I carry.

I descend into their darkness while quietly drowning beneath my own.

Because that’s what people like me do.

We seek to understand.

Not from a distance.

But from within.

Clawing my way back from the Abyss isn’t new.

If I’m being completely honest…

Sometimes I descend willingly.

Yes.

For fun.

Or perhaps curiosity is the better word.

Because I believe there is wisdom hidden in the underworld of the psyche.

There are truths that cannot be learned from books, only from living them.

Only by sitting beside suffering.

Only by allowing it to speak before asking it to leave.

The older I become, the more Buddhism makes sense.

Understanding suffering doesn’t free us from it.

It simply changes our relationship with it.

Pain evolves.

Grief evolves.

We evolve.

The ocean remains.

Today is one of those days.

The weight of my world presses so heavily against my chest that breathing feels like another spiritual practice.

I’ve tried everything I know.

Cleaning my Sacred Space.

Yoga.

Grounding.

A long shower.

Movement.

Prayer.

Even water, my oldest teacher, couldn’t quiet the storm this time.

I can’t create for the shop.

Not yet.

I refuse to pour unresolved sorrow into something meant to heal.

Some energy cannot be transmuted until it has first been witnessed.

Those who work with energy, who carry the stories of others, may understand exactly what I mean.

There was a family emergency this morning.

Today is also my grandfather’s birthday.

He has always felt closest on this day.

His presence arrives wrapped in memory, and memory has a way of reopening doors I thought I’d already closed.

There is still regret.

Still grief.

Still conversations that never happened.

Perhaps that is part of loving someone after they’ve gone.

Transformation has never asked to be easy.

Evolution has never promised comfort.

This season feels different.

The Cancer New Moon on my Solar Return has thrown open floodgates I didn’t realize I’d built.

Gratitude pours in beside grief.

Blessings arrive carrying shadows of their own.

I’ve learned enough to know that life rarely offers one without the other.

Every blessing demands that we become someone capable of holding it.

And becoming…

is rarely gentle.

The Full Moon approaches in my Capricorn Rising.

Neptune—one of my oldest companions—is in retrograde, pulling me once again beneath the surface where illusion dissolves and truth waits patiently in the dark.

To say I feel as though I am drowning would be the understatement of all understatements.

But perhaps drowning has never been my story.

Perhaps this has always been initiation.

Because every time the Abyss has opened its mouth and tried to swallow me whole…

I have become something it never expected.

Not a victim.

Not a survivor.

A hurricane.

I tear apart everything that can no longer stand.

I strip myself down to the bones.

And from those sacred ruins—

I rise.

Not despite the darkness.

Because I learned

it was never trying

to bury me.

It was teaching me

how to breathe

underwater.

To read more about the upcoming ‘Icebreaker’ Full Moon in Capricorn:

http://darkstarastrology.com/full-moon-july-2017/