Like a Phoenix rising from the ash...

As the story goes...a phoenix is a mythical bird from Greek mythology that lives up to 100 years. Near the end of it's life, it settles into a nest and then burns furiously until it is nothing but ash and dust. From that, a fledgling new phoenix arises renewed and reborn.

So from stress and strife comes a new life.  “Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy, which transports us into the soul and heart of another person. In those transparent moments we know other people’s joys and sorrows, and we care about their concerns as if they were our own.”
~Fritz Williams

Although no one has died, I do feel reborn...sort of.  Water always does that for me...as does some time away from my own life.  Even though this trip I had planned, saved for and worked lots of extra hours for was tiring, it was very rejuvenating for my soul.

I would have liked to have spent more actual DOWN time but there was so much to see and do it didn't feel right to do that...so I pressed on.  I don't regret one minute of it.  What I do regret is not taking the time to really talk and get on better ground with my friend who shared this adventure with me. Life always gets in our way back home here and I was thinking we would have some really free time to talk and get better connected. We were together 24/7 and we got along fine, at least as far as I know, but there was always this sort of unspoken thing going on between us that we just kept filling with activities until we were too tired to even think...then off to sleep, aka, to regenerate ourselves and then off to do it again.  It was probably the best vacation of my life and yet I came back to my own life of chaos, clutter and emptiness only to try to pick up the pieces I so easily left behind when I closed and locked the door.

It's funny, the older I get, the less I care about the things I used to. I spend way more energy and sleepless nights on the relationships in my life then I ever did when I was younger.  When I was younger, I was like...meh, oh well, it will be better tomorrow and now I worry....what if I don't get tomorrow?  I have to deal with it now.  I feel much more anxious about the things unsettled or unfinished in my life that ever before.  I suppose that comes with the fact that we all have to face our mortality.  I mean we are all only here for a limited time...no matter how much we fight it.

I am filled with constant regret over things I didn't get done in a day, or people I didn't reach out to, or things I can't get resolved. Over lost relationships, struggling to fit into places and people's lives that I don't really...it all gets so exhausting.

This is the story of my life – especially the part about burning ferociously. Life presents me with challenging circumstances that always sort of push me to my limits. I have to fight to keep my sanity and to look at things with fresh eyes so as to not bring the old in with the new. That's hard. I know I am not alone in this, it happens to all of us at some point, it’s a part of the human journey.

I spend much of my time being busy, trying to make things happen and often, I seem to overlook what is actually happening. I guess it's time to formulate a new plan. I am tired of being frustrated and impatient. Things happen in their own time - and yet I have very little control over what happens. 

When darkness descends, joy is blotted out, buried, seemingly non-existent.

The human spirit is resilient and wants to find its way home to wholeness.  These last month have me feeling like I've been through the fire  and not it's time to focus on what I can do to rise from the ashes:

• Let things happen.
• Give up trying to control.
• Don’t pretend you know what you don’t know.
• Stay close to what you know is true in the moment.
• Feeling bad isn’t wrong – it’s just how things are sometimes.
• Take good care of yourself.
• Get perspective.

It's a new season and thus a time for rebirth and growth.  It's time to fly.