Unraveling

Authentic Rhythms

A red fox barks at movement in some underbrush of goldenrod and wild carrot before trotting through groves of common beech and red oak. Bats cease their precise echolocation gyrations deep within eave shadows. A cricket harp adagio decrescendos into silence.

The land is unraveling, shaking off a yang patina while drifting into the slower yin rhythms of the wee hours.

Anticipating this portal, my body melts into the mattress, in tandem with my breath mingling with that of Mother Nature. My cats, Brigit and Gracie, sense change. They raise their heads, glance at me, twitch their ears, and then return to their half-slumber near my feet.

In need of direct contact with moist growth and soil, I carefully throw off the thin sheets and sit up. My green t-shirt and gray shorts, as I stand and stretch, settle on my upright form. With careful ease, I tiptoe through the dark apartment and out the screen door.

Everything is silvered by the glow of the Full Capricorn Buck Moon. Cirrus clouds swirl around its halo, pushed onward by a teasing wind. Like the Tree of Life, my arms branched upward, my bare feet tickled by perennial ryegrass downward, I center within the mystical cloak of this nocturnal world.

I am unraveling, shaking off validation as I shift into the unhurried rhythms of authenticity.

Since early 2020, I have been peeling away the final onion layers blocking its clear expression; however, until the start of 2024, a small part of me had been a tad anxious about the slowness of this transformation.

Yet I did not have verbiage to describe how I wove realizations together until one of Ashley Kester's reels popped up on my Instagram feed on the morning of Friday, 7/19/24. Her words struck a chord.

If you would’ve gotten what you thought you wanted, you wouldn’t have had space for what you … needed.

I had bullheadedly focused too much on the destination instead of ebbing and flowing like the ocean tides through my journey. When I realized I had to widen my aperture, it was too late, for I had already belly-flopped into a rank cesspool.

That fall from my crumbling ego tower hurt. But like a lotus unraveling its petals after establishing its foundation in swampy muck, I needed to hit bottom before expressing my pain, which, for me, had been increasingly manifesting as systemic soreness, fatigue, insomnia, and brain fog.

What was meant to break me, to paraphrase Kester’s message, became my breakthrough, the match that lit my strength. Set aflame, I climbed out of my hole and gradually learned to forgive myself for allowing my low vibrational self and other people to belittle and betray me, both to my face and behind my back. I also came face-to-face with my inner child and asked, “How can I come home?”

Although I am not encouraging others to actively seek out hardship, my epiphanies did (and continue to) cultivate a sacred level of emotional intelligence — its experiential wisdom, never static, a reckoning force.

There is much resoluteness, folks, when we are ten toes down; when we remove the swords stabbed into our bodies, minds, and souls; and when we temper said metal at the forge into the plowshare that furrows our inner fields for planting.

While reflecting on this and related subjects the other day, I encountered a question and later an answer in The Unfolding by

Arielle Estoria

. The exchange on pages 1-2:

‘What is truly so different about who you are today,’ asked her confidante, ‘from who you’ve been before?’

‘I’m not becoming someone entirely new,’ the author replied, ‘but rather finally feeling the freedom to step into who I always had been.’

A child of Source grounding under the Full Capricorn Buck Moon and the subtle essence of Cancer-Leo Cusp Sun, I align with my glorious sovereignty, husking and transforming layers. They fall to the ground and become compost for seeds, which root in the cracks and push nascent shoots toward galactic light.

Our amazing, messy authenticity is one with the Tree of Life, its transpired water vapor returning as rain, thereby alchemizing life’s vital mycorrhizal songlines within and without us. May we fully embrace it!