Gathering Dandelions

I am, in this moment in time, awfully sad. My heart aches in ways that I have never known before. My soul is bleeding, scarred, and bruised. These emotions, however, are profound, and I am allowing myself to sit – not wallow – in them. It is vitally important that I feel them, and rather than view them as an enemy, I must recognize them as a friend.

Because bleeding stops. Scars fade. Bruises go away. The lessons they teach us remain.

These emotions are here for an evolutionary reason: they help us survive, and they help us become better people, they give us a mere glimpse into other parts of our humanity that we don’t often access…because it hurts, and because it’s hard to access.

We cannot change the laws that exist within the universe, they are written by a power far beyond that which we can comprehend or control. We can learn about them, we can try to understand them, but we cannot change them. We cannot undo the past. We, for all we may want to believe, can’t slow aging or prevent our eventual death. We can’t change the stars, nor can we tell a tornado to stop.

Without profound loss, we cannot know the power of total and complete gratitude. Without the depths of despair, we cannot know the true power of hope. Without sadness as dark as the night, we cannot know joy that is so overwhelming our world lights up again. Without a total loss of control we cannot understand or even begin to recognize the boundaries that create safety for us.

These emotions, like all emotions, like all feelings don’t last forever. They help to transform us in a moment in time: whether a second, or a season. The feelings we have directly impact, and help to create, our behaviors. In recognizing, in gathering our feelings, like one gathers dandelions as a child: we can hold them, observe them, thank them, think on them, and then blow them into the wind, where they’ll take flight exactly as the laws of the universe (physics) have destined them to fly.

They will leave, and we will have been better off for having spent some time with them before we gave them flight.