I know that Venus is retrograde. She tugs on my emotions, upon the depths of my heart within my soul and spirit. The depths of old pains are risen up to the surface to demand their place in the moment, this moment, regardless of my wants or desires.
I know that I have had recent loss. I miss my baby-girl (cat), eighteen and a half years was not enough and though she slept all day and I wouldn’t see her for hours, she was there, always present now gone. Loss is in me, clear and supple in its freshness.
I know that August is an historically difficult month for me, for reasons even I don’t understand. Depression caws and calls and laughs bitter jokes at my expense, irrespective of what I think or what I do.
I know my fears about the success of my new career. Doubts abound, failure seemingly a looming danger growing with each week.
Knowing changes nothing on fear, knowing only allows a modicum of delusion, a dollop of superficial control over the emotion itself. It is dancing ants across the nape of my neck, cavorting in style over my not-yet-dead-corpse.
Knowing changes nothing. I sit and feel. Pain, sorrow, loss, fear, ragged shards pushing out from my core and piercing me, inside to out. I am jagged and fraught with danger even to myself, especially to myself.
Knowing the reasons for the feelings gives an entryway to deeper feeling, not less.
Knowing conveys an illusion of management.
Feelings will not be managed. They will not be kept or contained or bartered with no matter what parts of my soul I offer in return.
What wouldn’t we give to not feel pain?
I am submerged in the river of it and I would willingly drown if I knew that was the end of it.
But it isn’t. For the next minute continues and into the next. With all the attendant agonies crowding in for attention. Hungry children in a household without enough food. There is not enough of me left to feed them all and still be me at the end. Yet to ignore them, to deny them, to reject from them nourishment, is that truly better? They are, after all, me.
So I sit.
I hurt.
I fear.
I feel.
Hoping that the feeling will pass as a storm on the lake, leaving stillness, quiet, cleansing in its wake. Hoping the storm will pass and I remain recognizable after. Hoping the storm will pass.
~The Abysmal Witch