elements, gifts of darkness, and regenerative shadows ♡

I recently read Danielle Dulsky's The Holy Wild, a book of elemental verses, rituals, magic, and it has made me think about which elements have been weaving themselves into my life lately.

There's a place we were allowed to go for many summers before it was closed to the public. We waded through cold water into a cave, walls made of stone, earth, roots, with light and sky pouring in. Almost liminal in its contrast of dark and bright. We'd edge slowly back to meet a waterfall flowing from above us, an intense slamming rush of icy water, inevitably causing shrieks of laughter. We'd stumble-step back into sunshine, wind brushing against chilled skin. Awakened, connected, alive. More alive. Often, all the elements weave together like that for me, truly peak experiences, and water is always the home I return to.

This last couple of years, though, has had a lot of fire energy. Purging, releasing. Barren landscapes that will be ready for something more eventually. When I think it's been quite enough thankyouverymuch, I feel a discomfort that whispers and pokes until I listen, or draw a card that says WILDFIRE or BURN, or just know, and so it begins again, the spark, the loss, the transmutation.

Last night, I had a dream where I was conversing with my husband. He said that some people weren't exactly nice, but they were regenerative shadows. They helped energy to flow, ideas to form, things to happen.

The dream had a lot of threads to sift through, some toward the future and encounters to come, but it also made me think of the Mary Oliver poem entitled “The Uses of Sorrow.” She writes, “Someone I loved once gave me / a box full of darkness. // It took me years to understand / that this, too, was a gift.”

I have mourned the people I've had to walk away from, or who walked away from me, whose colors were shown, who were no longer healthy and aligned for my own life. Some of the gifts they granted me felt like gifts at the time, and others felt like energetic bruises (or worse) that gifted me insight through contrast and experience.

With that, a poem messenger. ♡