When You’ve Been Wrung Out.
When lights fade, when lovers’ love gets trumped by their contempt and obsessive expectations for perfection, when someone you love is ripped from your life in one moment when you hear that they are dead or dying.
When your heart hurts every moment of every day and the ache screams louder than any word or thought or touch. When the days drag on and on into one endless drone of distressed hopes.
When you know that the only thing you can do is wait for the brightness to return to your body, and you carry on painstakingly, slowly, but really you muster the fiercest forces in yourself to master the dark chapters of life.
When you look like a zombie, and feel like a zombie, but you keep pushing and believing that the life force that is drained by the heartache of today will flow and ignite a river of wild wonder again.
When every reality but one feels like your world is collapsing in on itself, draining you of all that you once thought was beautiful and noble in yourself and your life or replacing your heart with a glob of hypersensitive, edgy, melting flesh.
When you feel the burning in your chest and the lump in your throat and the pressure in your head of all the pain that is circulating in your blood. When life is this rough, this tough, this hard enough, keep going. If anything, just breathe.
Just wake up, get out of bed, fight the fight that is feeding yourself and bathing and doing all of the things that seem pointless and unnecessary, then go outside and breathe. Or sit inside and stare at a wall and breathe. Fight, struggle, gasp, scream, cry, yell, sob, forgive, stress, dance, sob more, but just breathe.
When life has ripped everything apart, what is left is love and breath and your heart and the god that you acknowledge in your soul. What is left is hugs from friends, and food from mothers, and chats with strangers, and laughter with your friends, and crying on your best friend’s shoulder, and surprise visits from your brothers.
When it all hurts, everything, swear to every bit of the pain that there is a light, and that you will find it, because you are supposed to, and that’s the whole point.
To be shaken and shifted and torn apart by the dark night of the soul, then to wake up one morning and find a field below kissed by the dawn’s fresh light, dew dripping on green leaves, birds chit-chatting in calm cacophony.
Then to feel you, redeemed, head held high, pain still forming lines in the wrinkles of your skin, but also framing your face with the dignity of daring to face all that which wrings you out, knowing that you will only be full again.
To know that each time you’ve been wrung out, you’ll find yourself again, fuller, fiercer, found by life’s promise that everything is impermanent and significant and full of love.
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Rebekah Kolbe, aka The Moonchilde to her equally eccentric friends, is a writer and newb Yoga teacher in the Michiana area in passionate cultivation of a consciously loving and creative lifestyle. When she isn’t writing sassy and sappy personal essays or exploring esoteric psychology, adoring her loved ones, practicing Yoga, cooking, making music, or walking in the woods, she is working for the creatively philanthropic company called MudLOVE. To get connected to more of her musings, go here.
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