light on

I look outside and see bleak. it’s the same scene as yesterday, the same street, with my neighbourhood’s three storey walk up apartments, hedges and sidewalk, balconies with flowerboxes and bikes. but today the air is grey, the wind bites through what is left of the flowers. shivering skeletons. the trees are slowly, brutally being undressed. their leaves lay like ashes, spread recklessly across the sidewalk, mixed with broken glass from a car window.

yesterday I looked outside with joy, to the sunshine, the promise of light. my body felt light, my spirit felt light. today is the same scene, and there actually is no absence of light - it is a nuanced grey that simply brings out a different depth to the colourful brick across the street, and to the trembling green-golden leaves, to the denim on the passing pedestrian, and the milky puddles of old mucky rain. so I look inside and wonder, is it my light that I’m worried about? how do I sustain that light I felt, these past weeks in the sharp sun and bright faces of Zimbabwe? that feeling in me that I was alive, that every moment mattered, every conversation a lifeline, and each breath, vital. so vital.

my return home has been fine. resting, fasting, and then being in my neighbourhood - buying groceries at my favourite places, seeing neighbours, bumping into friends. walking in the particular rose sunshine of a Montreal autumn and feeling the buzz of this city ~ fresh faces, chattering on the corner, the hum of French and English in and out of shops and cafes… on Sunday I saw more people in a day that I sometimes do over the week such was the energy in and around me. it was as much the sunday as it was my own curiosity and feeling of warmth of return…

and yet today, this bleak, this fear, is slowly skulking its way into my periphery. I don’t want to go back into old patterns, these ways that I have cultivated to protect my self from my own happiness, my own light. these past years have been spent too long insular, fatigued, depleted - and I see how it became habit, an excuse, to draw in. to isolate myself, from myself. I want that time to be over - and I have felt it shifting, and shaping and asking, ASKING to be let go. these habits die hard. do I need to be gentle? can I cut the chord? I thought I had, over and over. and yet the skulking feels real. it may be its last hurrah, attempting to show its face, or sneaking in unnoticed.

but I see you, and I need to look you in the face and say it’s over.

you were the company I needed, to live in my own dark places, to explore them and know them and not pretend that there is only Light. I needed to feel you and honour you, and know that you are equally a part of me, of all of us. you helped me shift my perspective, and see more, go deeper, and have compassion for those who live there. and then I let you stay for too long. Zimbabwe reminded me of the Light -of how it feels to be in the light, and come from my light. the liquid dark moon, and the shades of sun, have been showing me the nuances of my own light - and my quest, my question, is to honour these shades in me, and let the right one show up or slow down, as needed. to know myself, is to know the tune and cadence of my light, and to share and show up as needed, as required, as gifted, and ask from others the same.

so this bleak that I see - is simply a shade, but I am asking the habits that go with it to fade - so that I can see the nuances, and show up in the way that I feel, not the way of my fear.