The Solstice & New Beginnings

Yesterday was the winter solstice. At 9:30 AM I stood on the bank of the north fork of the Nooksack River and threw Kip’s ashes into the raging waters. The river was high, water catapulting over logs and boulders like rockets launched into space--wild, raw, powerful energy. She's been gone for three years. It was time for me to release her, and this was a perfect place for her last remains. She was a high-spirited dog with a wild, raw, powerful energy . . . Kip and the river, a match. There was a match for me as well, releasing behavioral patterning and unworthiness that has invited a life-long struggle with dominance and aggression.

I held the cold, silty, sandy, gray ash that once was her. I let her go into the river, and washed the powdery residue from my skin in the icy waters. I watched as the ash swirled, clouded the water and then became absorbed and unrecognizable. It is finished, over. Standing there in the cold moist air I was aware of more than just her ashes drifting away. I have been feeling this thing moving away, dissolving inside me, and now, gone . . . Gone like the ashes are gone from the container which held them, absorbed into the greater field of life.

I have worn something like an internal body suit since I was so very small. This was a suit of unworthiness with no spine, built to absorb the shocks and blows driven into me by magnetic elements sewn into the fabric serving like a siren for aggression and dominance. This magnetic absorber suit was contained in me where it became toxic to my system as the ashes funneled into one small space on this earth would poison the soil. It was time for release, time for letting go.

The section of the river I call the clear channel was anything but clear yesterday as might be expected. It was murky, turbulent and most certainly NOT calm . . . It’s the season for heavy flow in the river. I threw the coins of the IChing at the time of the solstice, 9:47 AM. It is my habit to throw them at the winter and summer solstice, and for the first time in years I didn’t throw a changing hexagram. I threw only one, #3 Difficult Beginnings (as recorded in R.L. Wings, The IChing Workbook). It’s the season for churning turbulence in the river and the same for me.

Difficult Beginnings. This had to be written for me, and I find it oddly comforting. It’s like the arms of the river, trees and wildlife were all wrapping themselves around me in an embrace of kinship, speaking peace to my heart . . . “We understand, we weather it all too . . . Sometimes we crack and break and grew new limbs . . . Sometimes we flood and form new channels . . . Sometimes we go hungry and lose our dens . . . And, sometimes we thrive, grow, bloom and bring new life all around. We weather it all too.”

Standing on the banks of that river I felt a part of it all . . . a part of the entire forest. I was one with the seasonal swelling and turbulence, one with the cycling, one with the constancy of nature . . . Just another creature crawling around on the surface. I am the river, the tree, the beetle under the wet leaves and the stones on the bank . . . and they are me.

Now? Difficult Beginnings. This is the way of it. No Disney story here with a sunset and a kiss. No, this is a different film, more like a documentary on a surgical procedure. The tumor is gone . . . now, jump off the operating table and dance a jig? I don’t think so. We slowly come out of the anesthesia, and our bodies slowly heal the wound and knit back together after surgery. Sometimes we need to learn to move differently, eat differently and in any case . . . It takes time. It takes a step by step development into new growth and new habits and behaviors.

I’m in a time very much like post-op and there is a new life ahead. The time of gathering darkness has passed and day by day we will be moving to more light in the sky. It doesn’t happen all at once, it happens a little at a time, minute by minute. I will be gathering a little more light in my life day by day. A new life, not a magical instant fix, a new life with a new me, a conscious moving forward step by step, into an unknown future with a little more light with every passing day.

That’s what this artist is thinking about today . . .