THERE ARE NO ENDINGS
There is nothing more glorious than the beginning of the path. Your heart soaring with possibility, you take that first baby step into the unknown. Trembling but alive, you walk.
It was never about getting to the end, reaching the finish line, it was always about falling in love with the beginnings. And life is always a beginning. Each step, each breath, each brand new day, each invitation to surrender, each sunset, each dawn, each wave of joy or sorrow, each chance to trust.
The ocean's waves do not end, they only fall back into their ocean, their Source, emerging again, falling, playing like children of infinity, held in unspeakable love. From the perspective of the Source, nothing has happened at all, except the dance. Endings are beginnings and beginnings are endings, here in the vastness of presence.
At the intersection, we meet. I don't know you, and you don't know me. Brought together by destiny or chance, we dance in the ocean's depths.
If you ran out of oxygen, I would breathe you.
- Jeff Foster
Endings seem to lie in wait. Absorbed in our experience we forget that an ending might be approaching. Consequently, when the ending signals its arrival, we can feel ambushed. Perhaps there is an instinctive survival mechanism in us that distracts us from the inevitability of ending, thus enabling us to live in the present with innocence and whole-heartedness. [] Experience has its own secret structuring. Endings are natural. Often what alarms us as an ending can in fact be the opening of a new journey - a new beginning that we could never have anticipated; one that engages forgotten parts of the heart. Due to the current overlay of therapy terminology in our language, everyone now seems to wish for "closure." This word is unfortunate: it is not faithful to the open-ended rhythm of experience. Creatures made of clay with porous skins and porous minds are quite incapable of the hermetic sealing that the strategy of "closure" seems to imply. The word _completion_ is a truer word. Each experience has within it a dynamic of unfolding and a narrative of emergence. Oscar Wilde once said, "The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realized is right." When a person manages to trust experience and be open to it, the experience finds its own way to realization. Though such an ending may be awkward and painful, there is a sense of wholesomeness and authenticity about it. Then the heart will gradually find that this stage has run its course and the ending is substantial and true. Eventually the person emerges with a deeper sense of freedom, certainty, and integration. The nature of calendar time is linear; it is made up of durations that begin and end. The Celtic imagination always sensed that beneath time there was eternal depth. This offers us a completely different way of relating to time. It relieves time of the finality of ending. While something may come to an ending on the surface of time, its presence, meaning, and effect continue to be held into the eternal. This is how spirit unfolds and deepens. In this sense, eternal time is intimate; it is where the unfolding narrative of individual life is gathered and woven.
John O'Donohue
Notes on Marshmallow
by Ana
For when you’re too hot when there’s a fire inside and it’s burning you up.
For dry, crackly-ness.
For when you need softness, gentleness and nurturance.
For soothing and smoothing.
For inflammation of the digestive tract.
For raw, sore throats.
For being cool.
Also known as Althaea, her leaves and roots are used to make medicine for such things like inflammation and dryness, as just mentioned.
Because of her anti-inflammatory properties, beyond being very beneficial for the digestive tract, she’s also very helpful when it comes to swelling and pain of the mucous membranes of the respiratory tract
She can also be used topically as a poultice for infections, such as abscesses, burns, wounds and insect bites
She can also be applied topically as an ointment for chapped, dry skin
My favorite way to consume her is as a tea infusion with a little honey, especially if I have a cough to tummy issues. :)
“Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype