Finding Joy
Long winters awaiting spring can’t be rushed or forced. Nature knows when seasons change and the wait is filled with the unexpected. So it is with us. We change. We have our seasons but don’t always know how to do so gracefully. Painful loss depletes the heart, and something of great value is lost inside the decay. Long winters seem timeless as the heart aches to feel, yet, again – something – more – than – loss!
The journey can seem unbearable, the future uncertain, and the past undecided. How to leave it behind or hold on to what could have been can be traumatic and difficult to work through.
Life revolves around change but it isn’t always clear to see the barriers, or the lessons to be mastered. This is when I felt despair entrapped in a circle going around with no exit.
What was it that I was missing or not able to release. Inside, where all life matters, I felt disengaged, alone and afraid in darkness.
So many seasons had passed through me. Phases of my life scattered into many pieces that had no meaning when love died. Seasons of growing up, searching for direction, my own identity, confidence and happiness mixed together with heartbreak culminated into something completely unexpected. Divorce. Raising children. Complicated with rebellion, struggling to gain a foot hold and then…a new relationship. Marriage. I began to see light and a way to achieve my dream.
Writing about the past helped me to find understanding, forgiveness and a new feeling of freedom. No longer a battered wife, I worked my way through healing and trusting in love again.
Together, we formed a partnership of raising my six children through the challenges known to parents of children with addictions…children who had been abused. Children who were hurting and finding ways to escape the pain.
This was also a time of excitement, a time of peace to clear a passage to a sacred space. I found a new woman existed in me. She was beautiful, kind, and strong but unwittingly resistant to the forces against her. And today, she still regrets her frailty to withstand the stress. It is a past clouded with many choices and consequences that framed her children’s world.
Consequences that came after a direction she once chose that had to be lived through to find healing…and to find her way, she embraced her spiritual path.
Leaving no stone unturned, I faced the shadows in me. I faced my childhood nightmares, my regrets as a young woman now aging through the years.
Standing against the wind, I would either remain grounded or uprooted and forever lost in the complexities of circumstances beyond my control.
My marriage remained intact in spite of the stress and day-to-day survival of raising my children. My dreams still in reach and hope against the odds.
Then when least expected, I felt withered and dry. Battle fatigued and perhaps resentful that so much of me washed away over time. The answer appeared to be in divorce, separation away from all the stress. Leaving everyone else behind, I needed renewal and revival. Instead, I found a dark world awaited as I went through transformational change.
I found new love, and then he was taken to the other side. Grief stricken, I returned home to my family and found support. I also came close to death from a brain tumor. Once again, I felt drained from all hope and winter returned. Recovery was long and filled with more challenges. And as I write, I’m now recovering from a broken hip.
All I have wanted is to feel nourished and strengthened and to feel joy. Joy, the heart’s song, the vibration that echoes through the Universe cultivating love in its purest form.
I’m finding joy again. I can feel my heart beat. I feel a closeness to God without fearing life or death and all of the heartache that comes with our natural existence. I feel fluttering butterflies awaiting the freshness of spring.
Joy! Creative joyfulness from beautiful heartbreak. I’ve felt the roots of my existence ripped from security and dependency to stand firm in faith. Now, gently, I feel my face against the sunlight – my heart open to receive.
I will hold to this Light, draw it into me, its rays are the nourishment needed to break through the barriers. The dry soil of the soul. This Light is healing. I feel like the seedling unafraid of new growth. Unafraid of the present, the moment of truth. Who am I and for what purpose have I journeyed this far?
I’m finding joy in my existence. I’m finding rebirth and what it is to be a new woman aged gracefully from turbulence and strengthened by hope and faith – this is the power of Love.
FREEDOM FROM PAIN 