Crying With The Moon

This week I cried with the moon. 

Not once, but twice. 

The first time, my period was really late. I knew it was coming, but it seemed trapped in my body, like it was waiting for something to happen first. I had so much anxiety, over both its lateness and many other things happening. I was working with some themes around feminine and masculine romance, and also pushing away some uncomfortable feelings brought on by that work. And so I drove up to the overlook, and was immediately taken by the sight of the large crescent moon, bathed in glowing red light. It was setting over the mountains, and I instantly and automatically cried. I gave her my fears and my insecurities and she accepted them. I said goodbye to the bleeding moon as she fell behind the mountains and went home, where I finally started bleeding the same night.

The second time, days later, I trudged into the woods through the fresh snow, my uncontrollable sobs echoing between the birch trees. For a few paces, I ran clumsily in my winter boots, as if I could outrun my feelings. Then I stopped entirely, looking up to the clouds…I knew it would be dark soon. I fell onto my knees from the sheer weight of my emotions and all the pain I was trying to pretend wasn’t there. But as I stared into the cloudy darkening sky, most of my body now submerged in snow, the moon, now much larger than before, peeked out for a minute, bright and demanding. Once again, she accepted my feelings. 

When was the last time you sobbed in a forest,

your breath labored against the silence of the snow,

because you knew your body could no longer hold the size of your emotions,

but the moon whispered to you that she could? 

Sometimes our bodies don’t have enough space for our feelings. We need release. We need a larger container. But the body has a wisdom of its own, and its wisdom often says, “Please. Take me somewhere safe.” 

Nothing compares to the complete acceptance of nature. No man or beast has the capacity for the true size of your feelings. But the moon does. The forest does. The goddess does. And so once again, in between sobs, I whispered my devotion to her as my primary lover in this world. 

Practices and Questions to Ask Yourself:

-When was the last time you took your feelings into nature? Have you ever cried in the woods? Screamed at the sky? Let yourself experience the kind of embrace nature gives you when you bring your feelings to her. 

-What feelings are too big to be held in your body? What feelings are too big to be held by others? How can you express them outside of your body? What does self-care look like for you when it comes to overwhelming emotions? 

This Bitter Earth

I watched a seagull fly over the gray-green water, feathers still brown with youth. Out of the corner of my eye, an older woman in a white swimsuit appeared on the rocks below me. She dipped one foot in the icy lake. Waves crashed up against the rocks where her other foot grounded her, spraying her legs. She didn’t see me watching her, but watching her I was. I watched her face silently grimace at the cold. I watched her as she held her foot in place for a full minute, acclimating herself before gracefully pushing her body off the rocks and into the water. I watched her gray hair floating up around her face as it disappeared underneath the surface. I watched her as she resurfaced, her mouth open wide from the shock in her lungs. 

I had just done that yesterday. There’s something about the cold water of Lake Superior that is magic. That punches you in the gut, sucks all the breath from your lungs in one instant, and makes you feel entirely alive. It hurts to be that cold. It hurts to have every inch of you seen and embraced and electrified by ice. But the pleasure that rolls through your body once you’ve endured that pain is warm, soothing, beautiful. 

That’s the thing about living in such a wild place like this. The harsh climate is painful. It’s isolating, difficult, untenable. And that’s what makes Northern people so fascinating and beautiful. We appreciate the difficulty. We dive into the cold and encourage it to surround us. We see how impossible it is to survive here and yet we survive. We see how harsh it is and yet we find the beauty in the gray. The life in the icy waters. 

I need places like this. I will never be one of those happy girls. There will never be a day I walk on this bitter earth without feeling the weight of my sadness. Every day I remember when I didn’t own my body, when I didn’t own my spirit. I remember how I have been irreparably altered and how there is nothing I can do to change the past, to change the pain I endured. And yet, each day I walk on this bitter earth, I see the unchangeable beauty. Not in spite of the pain, but because of the pain. I see the subtle glints of gold reflecting on the breaking waves from the diffused sunlight through the clouds. I see the brown-feathered seagull exploring her first year of life. I see the gray-haired woman smiling as she comes out from the freezing water. 

I am alive. It hurts, and I am alive.

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(This was the result of some intentional space I held for writing yesterday. I heard a song that really moved me and brought me to tears. So I went to a place I found beautiful while I listened to this song on repeat over and over. As I listened, I allowed my feelings to come up, I observed what was happening around me, and I wrote about it. No rules, no point. Just how the scene and the song and my emotions tumbled over one another. Lyrics in the photos are from the song. "This Bitter Earth/On the Nature Of Daylight" - Dinah Washington/Max Richter)