when endings are really beginnings

When I was 17 I longed for a life of creating. Making handmade greetings cards and little hand crafted gifts for family and friends brought me such joy. Writing poetry and short stories and longer stories and gardening. I knew the things that made me happy. Being out in nature, loosing myself in reading and writing, painting and making textile art. Climbing mountains. It never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t live these things in my life. For all my life. But then art college and teaching and not teaching and Having  Proper Day Job and bill paying and children and LIFE all coiled their beautiful growing branches around my dreams and my dreams changed with each new branch and grew and suddenly, almost without my intervention, came full circle. Looking back I feel so deeply within me that every part of this glorious journey has brought me exactly to this very point, and that without any part of the journey I would not be exactly here on this spot, right now, writing these words. And I love that.

When, almost a year ago, I got the letter to say that finally, FINALLY my employer was terminating my contract, I felt like maybe I was meant to be unhappy about it. When inside I was dancing a fiery flamenco and stamping my clippy, cloppy shoes on the ashes of the old life of working for The Man. Stamping the rhythm with my feet and raising my hands and my face and my soul to the glorious sunrise of my new life as a properly self employed person-who-owns-a-business. This ending of a time in my life when I felt I ‘d lost myself to the corporate climb of worrying more about making money than growing strong relationships, became a brand new beginning. A brand new day. And it wasn’t just that I’d allowed my soul the time and space to remember who I really was (the quiet girl who’d rather sit in a corner with a book than have a conversation with a real and alive person) but that I forgave myself for being someone else for a while. I acknowledged that sometimes we bow down to what we feel is the outward pressure to be a non-authentic version of ourselves, but that when the universe presents us with a gloriously golden opportunity to remember ourselves, we can take it with open arms and open hearts and say YES! Yes to life and to love and to living as authentically as we can, in this space under the stars.

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