Emptiness

It’s full moon outside, the last one of the year, sailing high and magnificent in a sea of stars. I feel like I should be making ceremony, casting prayers and wishes in its silvery light. But these last few months, it’s been a challenge to create anything. Bringing anything into form feels like a huge, overwhelming struggle.

And so I’ve been silent all that while, because the words feel too black-and-white, too finite on the screen to describe the emptiness that’s been my companion.

So I’ve got nothing to show for you. No Insta-pretty pictures of altars, no poetry or art, not even a snap of the woods as they abandon their summer covering and become stark; silhouettes and skeletons in the face of a dying light.

Yet I have come to love this emptiness. Not as an act of spiritual evolution but as a necessity. Fatigue is a stern teacher of the truths that surrender brings; a falling-away of attachment to expectations, goals, even dreams. I’ve simply been too tired, too weary and slow to run after their fading forms.

In the space that’s left behind when I finally give up the running, lives a strange kind of aliveness. A quiet energy that hums to itself. A wakefulness to all the ways in which life continues to thrum through my senses. It’s an acutely sensitive space, this emptiness. I’m painfully aware of how every inner shift, every thought finds an echo in the quality of my days. Of how I can still choose to experience exquisite joy for no apparent reason.

Bereft of my usual ways of powering through the world, creating change and chaos and effect, I’m discovering the grace of mutuality in my relationships.

So I can’t create ceremony to honour this full moon.

But I can sit for a moment and simply offer the moon a gift of my gratitude, and attune every sense to the way she lights up my world tonight.

Just for a while, to be breath and aliveness and awake right here, right now.