the amalgamation of blended opposites

a new year's prayer

This past year, I moved through so many consecutive endings and beginnings that they all started to blend together, becoming unrecognizable from one another.

I was familiar with the way love and joy appeared in the ashes of grief, but caught off guard by the grief that arrived woven into the fabric of fulfilled dreams.

Even the sun spends half its time in the underworld.

This life of ours is not just a life. It is equal parts death. Equal parts loss. Equal parts decay.

There is no means by which to control or hack the gravity and centripetal force of the cyclical world.

There is no trap door, no escape hatch, and nothing is spared.

The key lies somewhere buried in the flowers Persephone picks, and if we get quiet enough, we can hear the fullness of integration percolating deep within the womb of her mother, Demeter.

Tears become oceans, and the wind becomes our breath. What dies becomes the food we eat, digest, and feed to the reborn.

The liminal and the material dance into an amalgamation of blended opposites, where, for a moment, we mistake one for the other.

The “middle way” isn’t located in the sacrifice of poignancy. It exists in the balance we’re only able to find when we outstretch our arms far enough so that our fingertips can live in two worlds at once.