I felt Her closing up shop last night. After weeks and months of being on display, open and wide, She was done. “Close me up. Put me away for a while. Let me eat my pie in peace and go home.”
Enough. It is time for a rest, time for a break.
Big expansion, big growth. So many layers peeled away, so much skin revealed. The sun is scalding, and it is time to retreat into the shadows.
I hear Her wisdom. That schedule you have, that calendar you keep, it is an illusion. Come back to your own rhythms, your own timing. Step off the course you have charted. Remember Persephone and the time she must spend beneath the earth when all goes quiet and still.
It is good you have flown. It is beautiful you have expanded. Here is the next part of the lesson, we cannot stay aloft forever. We must come back to ground, come back to earth. There is no other voice you must heed, no other music to dance to but your own.
Come back to shadows, back to night. Back to moon.
Not to stay but to shelter.
Not to hide but to reimagine.
Not from fear but to nurture and nourish.
So let it go. Let it all go. That tight grip on schedules and goals and accomplishments. Let go of claps and smiles and lovely hearts that mean nothing. That mean nothing. Some man-made construct that keeps us running in our hamster wheels forevermore.
Come back to words on a page. Wisdom, beauty, healing, joy, fun. Come back to body. Moving, dancing, growing, playing, kicking, leaping. Come back to moonlight and stillness and wind chimes. Let’s relish the night when we use more than our eyes to see.
You are the only one who gets to decide. We are on winter break. We’ve taken a holiday. We are done with writing for the outside. Done with writing for others, writing to sell our words. Writing for approval or appreciation or anything that is other-oriented.
Let this be the season for making music for your own ears, hearing words from your own soul. You have shared enough skin and it is time to let this be one to rest in.
And just as I lean into the peace of this invitation, flags rise in warning.
Is this a cop-out? Are you just tired and feeling a bit lazy? After all the work you’ve done, you would simply walk away, close the door?
Not really surprised at the inner pushback. And wondering if I really want to stop posting, publishing my writings.
But what if it isn’t black or white, day or night, but rather dusk and dawn? What if it is simply what is true this morning, this day? Feeling into what calls, pleases, tickles, delights, today. Each day is free choice. We get to choose every single day.
The shop doesn’t need to close completely, maybe it’s on winter hours. As the colors shift from yellow to tawny, from red to maroon, from periwinkle to midnight.
And what if my ‘other’ shifts as well? Rather than the abstract, unknown ‘followers’ I imagine friends around a fire. More intimate, more delicious. I share these stories with them in trust and faith, not because I want more highlights or the 2-cent read, but because it feels good. To offer my stories like a bowl of warm soup, a slice of bread with melting butter.
One last flurry of objections, those old paradigms and triggers. “You’re sabotaging it. You’re tearing it all down. You’re letting fear win. All the money you spent, again! Wasted.”
Maybe it is the gift of age, maybe it is listening more carefully to my own voice than to the noise beyond. Maybe it is the recognition, that at the end of the day, the only one I need to please is myself.
I turn the sign on the door to “Winter Hours – Most Unpredictable.”
I feel it, deep inside, like a warm blanket pulled over my lap, Her breath of relief, “Ah.”