Ramblings of change

I returned from Sark to find chaos in the moon garden! The St John’s Wort has taken over the Oil of Evening Primrose and the flowers all needed picking, so too the last of the chamomile, and the endless mint, gosh, it really has gone quite wild and this after just a few days of being left alone in the rain and the sun.

It’s been funny old weather but the garden has loved it and judging by all the blackberries taking form all over Sark, these have loved it too. But here the garden has especially thrived and I am very aware that all my plants are planted really far too close together, and yet despite this, they are still abundant in their growing. There are flowers! This is the second year for many of the plants - they’re flowering year, I missed all this last year, so it is a real treat.

But of course it’s thrown me into a spin because what on earth do I do with everything?! My first ay back found me rushing around trying to process all the dried leaves and flowers in the drying rack, to turn them into teas, this so I could create space to dry more of them. Then there was the endless picking, goodness, who would have realised it took so much time to pick St John wort’s flowers, and then turning some of the pickings into tinctures and oils.

I also returned with this renewed sense of getting things done. I had ordered a Vitamix as a birthday present to self and this still sat boxed and unopened, so i was keen to get going and make some much needed nut butters and humous of my own. What a delight! I’ve wanted to do this for ages but never got going, so I am grateful to Katie for getting me going, and for putting me onto healthy supplies.co.uk where you can buy organic nuts and seeds and all sorts of other things at a reasonable cost. I’ve got the almond milk to make next…

There was also the Ayurvedic consultation space to set up. I’ve had it in mind for ages, but this required clearing out a space and moving furniture etc. I’d made steady progress, throwing away a ton of out of date paperwork that was just holding old energy, and clearing out cupboards that were housing stuff we no longer needed. It’s all just stuff really! We found a gap to negotiate an old sofa down the stairs and I managed to shift a few other things and voila, finally the space presented itself to me.

It feels a long time in coming and yet absolutely the right timing to it too. Sometimes it takes time to step up into a more aligned and authentic version of ourselves and along the way things have to drop away. The dropping away is never an easy process. Nor is settling into the uncertainty of not knowing what is coming next. This can throw up feelings of fear as there is nothing stable to hold onto, nothing concrete. It can throw us into quite a spin, as we desperately try to figure out a way forward, but without having clear idea of this.

I’m in that zone right now and I know others are too. If I can elevate my perspective to see that I’m in it, then it’s actually very exciting, but when I am caught up in the thick of it, it can be extremely unsettling.There’s a lot of change in process. Elijah finishes infants tomorrow and Eben finishes pre-school. Yet more change in September as I have to attempt to settle Eben into big school and Elijah steps up into juniors. Both suffer with separation anxiety, the common factor being me, so I guess I must allow it on some level, we all have an inherent fear of being separated from one another! It’s not easy to manage, drop-offs are emotionally exhausting, age-inducing, after 4 years of it now.

Eben is also going through his own changes, as he transforms from a little boy to a bigger boy and plays around with self-weaning. I’ve been breastfeeding him now for 4 years and 9 months and before him, Elijah for 2 years and 1 month, so it’s quite a shift for me too. But one has to accept that the children want to fledge from the nest as they become increasingly independent. However I am very aware that they always need their mum, and their dad, just the demands change.

It’s funny how much of our lives can be dedicated to something like breast feeding, where once it was all consuming, every 3 hours in those new born days, to nightly, and how we just get on with it, forgetting that there was a life before it and will be a life after it. I never imagined back then, that I would keep going this long. Or that at the age of 7 and a half, Elijah would still require one of us to lie with him when he falls asleep at night. That’s over 7 years of one of us being at home every evening to put him to bed, bar the few times in the earlier days when he would stay with my parents before separation anxiety put pay to that. Eben has never slept away from home yet.

So it is a change. We have now entered the world of sleep overs and having Elijah’s friends to stay over. Eben’s started going to clubs when I said I would never do this with my children, be their taxi service. but this is what happens. He wanders around with a football most of the time, the kitchen has become an indoor football pitch, a basketball court, a hockey pitch and a tennis court. There is often a ball or a plastic bottle flying around, the latter because of some You Tube challenge where children throw a bottle to see if they can land it right side up. Eben spends hours perfecting his bottle throwing.

Even the cat is going through a period of transition. He’s losing his mind and forgets he’s eaten. He miaows for no apparent reason. He walks from the front door to the back door and back to the front door again. It’s a relief when he finds a comfy place to sleep and gives us some peace for a few hours. I never used to let him sleep on the bed, but even this has fallen by the way side. It humours me how much we end up letting go over time.

This is life though isn’t it, peaks and troughs, and periods of noticeable change. It’s not just teh external world, but the internal world that goes through its transitions. We have changes of heart that find us seeking a new direction, of wanting to live life differently. That’s where I’m at. It’s been another one of those years, what with lockdown, and all the various Reiki attunements, let alone the eclipse and all the hanging around in dolmens. It was inevitable really, that things would change.

But when life is busy and constantly organised into a neat timetable of always doing, it is very difficult to see the wood through the trees, and absolutely impossible for the old to drop away. I was sick for two days recently and I am never sick, I just picked up a cold from the boys and I knew that it was because I needed to slow down and drop in. Stuff needed to drop away. It was an intense few days, followed by this wobbly energy up to the new moon, which was a wonderful new moon, because we were in Sark and there was a whole heap of space. There’s always a settling after a new moon and a day of total chaos.

I notice that in that chaos I cling to the past. I try to find reasons to do what I’ve done before, to hold on to what’s been, or to reach for it again. It’s not that my heart is longing for it, only that the fear gets the better of me, because I absolutely have no idea where life is going and as exciting as that is (as I mentioned above) it is horribly disorientating. But if we can settle into the discomfort, be with it, rather than turning away from it, or reacting to it, then we will move through it, and life will change by itself without us actually having to do anything about it.

Saying that, it can be helpful to take yourself somewhere on your own, out in nature, and just settle into yourself. Take some breaths, meditate if you can, or watch nature unfold in front of you, anything to get you more in tune, and then write or draw, from the heart, all that you feel inside you needs expression at some point, all that you hope and dream for in this world, almost like a vision board of sorts. Sometimes it just needs to come out. But then we put it aside, pop it away, let go of any attachment to outcome, to forcing things to happen and just know that when our personal will is aligned with divine will then all will come to fruition, in its own time.

There is a timing to all of life. A time to be active and a time to step back. We women especially have our menstrual cycles to guide us through this, so that we are naturally drawn to retreat from the world at times, and also to be very much in the world too. For me the summer is always one of retreating from an otherwise busy workload and yet taking the time to be out in the world, on the beach mainly, if the weather allows, and we’re backwards and forwards to Sark, which feels increasingly like a second home. There’s something about the energy of this place that feeds me energetically and spiritually.

We all need to be fed energetically. We all have our ways. For some it is feeding off others, for others it is feeding off place, or space or some activity. Once we know what we feed off, what fills us pop, it makes it easier for us to seek it when we know that we need a pick-up. Silence feeds me, so too spiritual landscape and working with energy. In the silence of giving reiki there is great joy. Sometimes we don’t realise the extent to which we fulfil our needs by the things we do. More often we notice when we are not meeting our needs and we feel depleted.

Which brings me around to the whole sharing today, of change. Mainly because I know I am not the only one going through this transition, we are being awakened and asked to step up collectively. It’s helpful then that we know what does fill us up, asking us few energised and feeding our authenticity. This because it is easy to kid ourselves and to settle for jobs or situations that don’t allow any of this, because we lack the awareness of what we do actually need. It’s easy to cling on to what is known, to do more of the same, albeit in a different place, or under a different title, simply because we don’t know how to be with the discomfort of the unknown.

There sre stepping stones too. Sometimes we have to move somewhere to allow us to take the next step after then, to where we are actually meant to be. The risk is always forgetting to take the step and getting stuck in the middle. I’ve seen this happen with relationships and jobs, the stepping stone is overlooked and people settle into something that isn’t quite aligned but was better than where they were previously, albeit precarious as it is based upon a stepping stone, a place that is meant to allow movement, not settling.

We all find our way eventually, or we don’t. Something will happen though, illness, death, redundancy, something to awaken us and prompt us back to the heart. The heart always knows best, but sometimes we can’t hear its because there’s too much noise around us and within us. And thus we come all the way back to silent practices, that allow us to settle more fully into ourselves, yoga, Reiki, gardening, solo walking, all of this can give us the space we need, and the grounding to really feel and listen.

Enjoy your transitioning. I’m told 2022 is going to be a big year, so 2021 was always going to have to facilitate that and get us questioning and opening up to new possibilities, of unsticking ourselves if we have gotten stuck, of dreaming new dreams and of letting go of all that’s been. It’ll take its time, there’s a pause right now, great big exhale taking place…keep exhaling too, and letting go.

Love Emma x