Endings

It’s utterly surreal how much my life has changed in the last eight years. I set out on a specific course, reached a major fork in the road, chose a direction, a dream, and now I am starting over with a dream I’ve somehow managed to keep hidden in the back of my mind, all the while making movements towards it. “Everything happens for a reason…” Sometimes that sounds like horse-shit and other times, it’s the absolute truth.

In the last eight years I have lost, loved, lost, and continued to love. Every single time I think I am shut off and that my capacity for love is gone, I am proven wrong. On this day last year, I brought an angel home. Today that angel is officially a year old and while there are a great many types of love, this one is pure and special. I feel blessed and honored to be in the presence of this love. This is the kind of love that keeps you alive and gives you purpose. It reminds you to keep fighting and keep living, even when you truly don’t want to. Even when you say “No more!”, that love is present and let’s you know that it’s okay to feel the way you do, and that you’re completely accepted.

Once or twice a year, I do a Celtic Cross Tarot Card reading for myself. I don’t do readings for anyone else because it makes me uncomfortable, but my own readings are so accurate that they bring me to tears. My most recent reading was dead-on accurate and I remember being slightly in denial at the time, but now I realize it was a message, and it was telling me exactly what I’ve been telling myself for the last few years. I liken it to a loved one treating you badly in public and a stranger stopping you to tell you that you deserve better. You KNOW you deserve better in your heart of hearts, but sometimes hearing it from someone else’s mouth is the push you need. Many of my readings are like that. In fact, all of them are. I’m really quite disturbing with the metaphysical.

Today would normally be a celebration of something else, but this year I celebrate love and new beginnings. That is the right direction, that is the answer, and I needn’t attempt to dissuade myself when I know the answers.

My mother wrote a letter to me before I was born. I found it after she died. It said “Sometimes you have put yourself first, but it doesn’t mean you’re being selfish.” She was a supremely unselfish woman and she raised me to be pretty unselfish as well. Of all the people I have lost, it’s my Mom’s voice that I can’t always remember, until I read something she wrote or a memory comes flooding back and I hear her say my name the way only three people in my life ever did. Looking at photos this morning, I realized just how much I miss my family and how I’ve never given myself time to grieve.

Thankfully, I know that there are all a part of who I am and that they’re not truly gone. Bits and pieces of each of them live on inside of me, and so, with every ending comes a new beginning.

This phoenix is ready to spread her wings and fly. She’s already been through the fire.

“Endings are abstruse, mystic and unreal. They are but depleted beginnings purposed to be substituted with newer ones. A transition of outlook and time, similar to our differing moods before and after slumber. Before the act we witness an exhaustion, a sulkiness but on gaining consciousness, we’re rejuvenated and good-humored. The wakefulness is the new beginning whereas the tension the disturbance we perceive each night is the weariness of the beginnings, of each day. So there never really is an end, all that there are, are beginnings. Beginnings which are promising, which offer hope, which have a new leash on life, which neither denounce nor belittle rather soothe and console by reconstructing the broken pieces of yesterday, mending them and reinforcing them with courage and beauty like never before.” ―Chirag Tulsiani