Finding Perspective in Challenge & Change
I once wrote the words March comes with a side dish of chaos.
For whatever reason, I’ve found this to be true across the years.
Maybe it’s because March is named after the God of War, Mars, and Mars energy is typically fiery, willful, and can be conflict-oriented.
Maybe it’s because March hosts the vernal equinox and there’s a hectic rush of energy as the earth makes her final preparations to awaken and birth us into spring’s cycles.
Maybe it’s because people tend to get a little more restless and squirrely in March as the days lengthen and daydreams of long summer days begin to bloom.
All I know is that this March, like last March and the March before that, served up a lot of energetic curves and challenges.
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on how to keep perspective when life corkscrews and we run into unexpected bumps along the way.
I think when challenges happen, it’s human nature to ask some form of the question- why is this happening to me, and wonder if we somehow attracted, manifested, or created our circumstances.
In spiritual circles there are adages like everything happens for a reason, our outer world is a reflection of our inner world, and our energy flows where our attention goes.
I believe that there are aspects of truth in all these ideas, and yet the more I travel on my life journey and observe the events within the greater collective of our world and within my world, the more incomplete many of these feel.
Like I’m starving for a hot, nourishing, sustaining meal and somebody hands me an ice-cream sandwich and bag of airplane pretzels.
“Horrible things can come from something that seems beautiful and beautiful things can come from something that seems horrible. Who’s to say what’s better?”
I wrote those words in March of 2016 and later used them as a passage in Lamentations of the Sea.
At the time, it was two months after the loss of my brother and I was discovering that the weight of my grief was becoming heavier – not lighter.
For some naive reason, I thought the first month would be the worst, and then the freshness of the pain might begin to slowly lift and lessen.
Instead, what I found was that January through May felt heavy and gray, and it was only in the light of an Alaskan summer, surrounded by baskets of bright flowers and colorful blooms, that I felt some of the heaviness begin to soften.
One June day I had a vision of a desolate field, devoid of life, and then I saw a lone purple wildflower pop up. Not long after I was watching an episode of Friends and I had my first spontaneous burst of genuine belly laughter in months.
Hope crept back in small squiggles and tentative waves that helped me find the grace space of appreciation for the gift of my own life and left me with an aching awareness of how fleeting each moment can be.
That time in my life taught me grace. It taught me that grief is a form of alchemy. It helped me find the courage within to change my course and set my compass to leave Alaska and move to Kauai.
And it taught me that sometimes terrible things lead to wonderful beauty and that most things are not what they appear to be on the surface if we can trust our soul to help us see through the eyes of love.
“If a lone flower can bloom in the midst of ugliness, so can you.”
I wrote those words in the summer of 2018. It was early August, we’d been on Kauai just over a year and our beloved dog, Samwise Gamgee, had unexpectedly died on July 2nd.
I felt bitter and disillusioned and struggled to find perspective in my grief.
I was a year into my Kauai journey and though the island was as beautiful as I expected, nothing else was as I thought it would be.
Numerous challenges and hardships had happened during year one and it culminated with losing Sam just eight days shy of our first island anniversary.
There are times in life when we have to fight for gratitude, fight for perspective, and fight for joy, and this was one of them.
As I worked through my grief, I remembered the lessons I learned from losing Brent, and I knew I needed to dig deep to move through the heart of the pain and this directionless sense of injustice that I had over losing Sam too soon.
One day I was sitting out on the lanai, staring out at a misty jungle when a single orange bloom caught my attention and I found myself musing on how flowers can find a way to grow in some of the harshest conditions.
It made me think about what flowers can teach us about our ability to find a way to blossom, even when life has been muddy for a time.
“Never forget: Personal transformation is magic too. Darkness is magic too. Sorrow is magic too. Mud is magic too.”
I wrote those words last spring. It wasn’t the easiest season in life due to a variety of stressors and difficulties that all hit at the same time.
I had a challenging time hanging onto a sense of lightness and ease, and instead, I reacquainted myself with how hard and gritty the human journey can be.
I was reminded at the time that sometimes we need to descend before we can ascend. Sometimes we need to work with our shadows, allow for the full expression of emotions, and grapple with the grit.
Grappling is how we find perspective. It’s how we potentially make a mindset shift, gain insight, or find a new way of healing our wounds.
Grappling is part of being human, and Spirit’s grace is such that no matter how dark we may feel when we’re going through our psychological depths, we are always spiritually loved.
There is potential in a dark space, because Spirit/Life/Universe holds the grace space for us, which allows us to safely dive into our depths.
And there is magic in our depths. Magic in our shadows. Magic in the forgotten pieces of self, who can be powerful teachers on where we most need healing and compassion.
We can learn to constructively work with these challenging ingredients of self and use them for personal transformation - that’s how we transmute our pain into love.
How can I be kind to myself in this? How can I make peace with myself in this? How can I practice self-grace in this?
I posed those words to a client earlier this month.
We were talking about how asking the question, “why is this happening to me,” is often a dead-end street, because the “why,” will often leave us mentally spinning and worrying we’ve done something wrong, but asking how we can be kind, gracious, and peaceful towards ourselves in any circumstance immediately connects us with our heart wisdom.
This is how we learn to lead in love, beginning with leading in love in our relationship with ourselves.
Sometimes there is no good why to be found. Life is messy. Chaotic. Sometimes it feels like a grand design is in the works, and sometimes it feels like the universe went off line and all systems crashed.
Sometimes it’s hard to make sense of the bigger picture, and we struggle to find perspective.
In nonsensical, challenge-filled times like these, I believe it’s helpful to still remember—
There is self-compassion. There is self-kindness and grace. There is personal transformation. There is our sacred inner work. There is the wisdom of nature. There is the wisdom of the heart.
And our heart’s intelligence often senses what our minds can’t always see—
If we can relinquish the need to know, control and figure everything out, we can surrender into a more graceful flow where we learn to lean into life’s curves, laugh at the unexpected dips and twists, and remember that life is fluid like water, and the river will always find its way.
