{*Did you know you can write on Elephant? Here’s how—big changes: How to Write & Make Money or at least Be of Benefit on Elephant. ~ Waylon}

~

Every so often, we’re dropped into these places between worlds. Places where we’re hungry for answers, for a handhold, for anything.

And most of the time, there aren’t any. Not now. Not yet.

In these spaces, the emotions come quick and change often. The mind scrambles—more than anything, our human minds want scaffolding, next steps, a railing, a hammer, a glue gun, and some glitter.

Something.

Anything.

These are among the hardest places to be.

When we dangle, just beyond gravity.

Our minds race, our hands shake. We find the smallest slivers of comfort—a sweet song. A prayer that feels heard. A moment of silliness. A glimmer where we know, for certain, that we are part of all things: the arching pine trees, the stars, the air between them.

Then, fear rushes in, knocking these moments of ease to the floor.

This is a blessing for your old life. The one you had, at least haphazardly, mapped out. A life of planning and housework and scrolling and daydreaming about a someday retirement, someday travel, someday concerts and friends and more love.

A life of waiting. Of “just in case.” Of “better safe than sorry” and “save it for later.” Of comparing your insides to everyone else’s outsides. A life where you worried about money and security because you loved the smoky, narcotic trance of it. You craved certainty. Safety. Stability.

Now, after the phone call or the diagnosis, after the text or the officers standing at your doorstep, you are in a different life. One pierced with the knowledge that those things you strived for, you worshipped, are mirages, capitalism, distraction.

Say goodbye to anything that no longer serves you. Productivity as your self-worth, your higher power. Say goodbye to counting steps and calories. Wonder—why have I been measuring my life in numbers instead of moments?

Wonder: why would a poet pursue productivity, instead of poetry?

Feel yourself coming awake, coming alive.

You have felt this before.

This inkling, this crawl into knowing, that the things that crack you open are also the ones that set you free.

That allow you to feel loved.

Alive.

Connected.

There is a reason that the words scared and sacred are so close to one another.

You have felt this before, sweet one. You felt it when someone you couldn’t live without died, or when someone failed to love you back. You felt it in the freefall of grief, where there are no handholds. You felt it in the way the world, it seemed, leaned toward you, supporting you, holding you so gently you might’ve missed it. You’ve felt it in signs and synchronicity.

You felt it looking out the window from a hospital in the desert, when someone you loved was sick, and you thought—this is not my landscape, but it is somehow still beautiful, and your heart held all that bald beauty right alongside all the fear and ache.

This is a blessing as we move from one kind of life to another.

We didn’t ask for this, wouldn’t have prayed for this, and yet here it is, on our doorstep.

Even when the cynic in you rises, and you ask yourself if this is just some type of human grasping, some defense mechanism of the human brain to scramble for meaning—ask yourself: so what? Isn’t that its own type of beauty, its own type of god?

Be gentle. Be open. This is the story of your life—the things that undo you are often the things that make you more whole. More wholehearted. More essentially, undiluted you. Welcome each like the sky welcomes weather—with ample space for each one, with the knowledge that each system will move through.

We all land here, in this uncertainty, if we live long enough.

Goodbye, old way of being. It’s okay to cry. It was a good life, a life that mostly fit. It was comfortable. It hurts to be remade, to be born, to birth. To see the smoke rise and scatter above your charred Before.

Feel all of it. Cry on the bathroom floor. In your car. In your bed. Pray. Beg. Laugh. Watch crappy TV and play silly merge games on your phone. There are no wrong feelings, your spacious heart has room for them all. Welcome them. Let them go.

This is a blessing for your new life. To the deep knowing that you are held, even in this freefall. That you are not alone, even in the aloneness of your own mind. That you are loved, even in the spaces where you feel unlovable.

~

{Please consider Boosting our authors’ articles in their first week to help them win Elephant’s Ecosystem so they can get paid and write more.}