allowing

art- @elena.ray

words- me

As I met my moon-time this month with the intention of writing about ritual, I kept stumbling over definitions of what that was. Sometimes I need to soak my feet in warm water steeped with herbs. Or light candles, mist myself with rosewater and meditate to clear cobwebs from my being.  Sometimes I need to sit down with Netflix and a glass of wine to watch something that will send my tears falling, emptying the emotion from my knotted center.  Or dance alone in my room, limbs all ecstatic to remind me of this body's beauty. This month I needed all those.  And with all the advice of how and why to do this practice or that, it’s easy to forget to just close my eyes, place my palms over my womb, and surrender to what wants to be.  I feel the greatest gift we can give ourselves is the allowance to tune into the depth of our beings and let be. Because we are all great mysteries who may not know until the moment comes, what we need.  I can try with my writer’s mind to define the paradox, but nature is not still and words will never contain it!  It is not this or that, but constantly ebbing to flow.  As are we.  Great oceanic beings connected with dark mystery. We embody it, shedding our insides every month, bleeding to renew. Our bodies know what to do.  In one moment we may feel broken open with the tenderness of a Divine Mother, and the next a feral cat ready to claw, and there is an honest and perennial beauty in these seemingly opposing forces.  Don’t be afraid of your ever-shifting mystery, your needs or wild feelings, oh holy one, your body was made to transmute energy in motion. And there is great power in allowing what desires to be expressed through you, and naming that, ritual.  So place your palms over the vast space of your womb, move like nature and swallow the mystery whole.