When We Fall

 “Your first parent was a star.”

from Weight by Jeanette Winterson

I do a nightly meditation to relieve my stress and remove the chaos of the day before I sleep. We all carry weights on our shoulders that no one else sees. We are each together in our unspoken burdens. Like our ancestors before us, we soldier forward, unknowingly adapting and evolving to bear the burden of time and knowledge, and we learn to shine brightly despite the residue it leaves behind.

We are each stars in our own dark night. We are each the thing we need to survive, our own bright knight, our own magical kiss to break the spell. We are the conduit between the past of our spirit world that lives in star energy and the past of our physical world that lives in the earth beneath us. Our bodies are the space where earth and sky meet.

I do this as a meditation, pulling energy up from the earth into me and calling energy down from the stars into me. I do this with the lesson of Tree, and I become rooted, hands dancing in the exhalation of breezes softly blowing. I use Tree because they breathe in seasons, slowly. In this meditation, the excess stress and worry drains back into the earth for transformation and transmutation.

I become the root in the earth and the tree staring into the night, and the star lighting up the sky. I am all these things and I am me. I stand on the bones of my ancestors and I look to their memory. And in the dance between yesterday and today I find myself in Now, even if just for a moment. And my world stills, as the world around me continues on. It becomes music, percussion, orchestration that is but does not distract. In this stillness, my weight disappears. I become light. I am light. I exist in the dark night and I am not tarnished. I shine in spite of. I am brilliant.

Yet even stars fall sometimes. We all fall sometimes.

The weight becomes unbearable and we spin out of control. We all have moments in our lives where our worlds lose their compass and we have no sense of direction. We just want to grab onto a buoy and hold on until the storm passes or the waters calm themselves. We need to hold onto something. Anything. We are leaden and forget we can fly. We forget we can shine a beacon so fierce that it will push the gloom away.

What was your darkest night? What, in your life, shook your world to its core so much so that all you wanted to do was to build your own cave, crawl under the covers and pretend nothing existed outside of them? And we have to let ourselves revel in the fall momentarily, to feel the impact it has on our bones and our tissue. To feel the change rippling from within us, moving with an outward trajectory. We have to feel the change before we can stand in it.

There are lessons lying in wait for us in all the events of our lives, if we can see them. Our ancestors who came before us forgot as well, when they fell. They also had moments of hardship where it didn’t seem like things could possibly get better and they sat in fear that they could, or would, get worse. Living and surviving are not easy, even though we have built comforts up around ourselves to pretend they are. We all have these moments because we have always had these moments. But now, in the spirit world, our ancestors remember what we forget in this one.

In shedding the physical they remember the lessons. I call in the wisdom of their bones as I pull energy up from the earth. I call in the guidance of the history of ancestors who are starlight above us. I pull it into me to feed the fire. With their strength, I burn as brightly as I can. I am the only flame I need against gloom and doubt.

Falling is clumsy and painful. Grace lies in how we pick ourselves up. In whether or not we can shake ourselves off and move forward despite the weight of it. And we can. For generations, we have. We must shine brightly, to show others that it is possible. To show others the way.

Who wants to stare up at a night sky devoid of stars?

*photo is courtesy of energytalkradio.wordpress.com