Meet Rose Black
Autumn is a beautiful word. It’s a beautiful name. It’s a beautiful season. Truth is, I find it difficult to be in the beauty of fall without slipping into sadness about the loss of summer, the loss of the warmth, sunshine, and color, about the coming dreary weather, bare landscape, and darkness. I escape into nostalgia of autumns past and the glistening yesteryear. Trying to hold onto the beauty makes me miserable. I know it’s foolish, but that’s how much I resist loss.
What would it be like to feel okay about loss, about change, about letting go? What would it be like to trust life and trust myself so that I’m willing to let go of beauty, to feel any feeling that arises, and then let it go?
Lately I’ve been more aware that my beliefs about loss limit my dreaming, my growth, and my expansion. This is one example of how the limiting beliefs hold me back:
Recently, I took a big step in fulfilling a lifelong dream to create and lead a workshop about what is most tender, intimate, and important to me — cultivating sacred connection. I was aiming for heart opening. I desired to let my light shine.
I thought that when I completed the workshop I would be elated, filled with the Divine, standing at the crest of a mountain peak, a glorious vista in the center of my heart. In the hours following, I didn’t know what landscape I was in, but it wasn’t a peak. It took fidgety restlessness and an hour of bike riding to recognize I was feeling loss. I was baffled. Inside, I felt like I was booney-cruising through the woods on the side of a mountain, uneven ground, no trail, no bearings.
I got so caught up in the fact that I was feeling loss when I thought I should be happy, that I just kept dwelling on the loss all week, worried that something was really wrong. I basically manufactured a problem. In truth, I felt loss for, like, a few hours, but I woke the next morning and restarted the worry by focusing my morning practice on why I feel loss and what is my block to letting it go. I was upset that I couldn’t let loss go. (Are you shaking your head? You’d be right to be shaking your head.) Writing this, it seems ridiculous, but when I’m panicked, stuck in my fears like a room of distorted mirrors, I start to fear that there is no door to get out.
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In the movie Meet Joe Black, corporate mogul Bill Parish hears a whispery voice in his head repeating “yes.” It follows him for days. Then, while he’s just waking up, and is feeling heart attack warning symptoms, in that liminal consciousness he finally hears the voice clearly, the question he’s been answering “yes” to: “Am I going to die?”
My Meet Rose Black question is “Can I Be with this much beauty, this much joy, this much fulfillment? Can I let more joy/love/beauty in?” Bill Parish sensed a big change that would make him unrecognizable to his current self. That’s an exciting possibility; excitement and fear are only a hair different. If I fulfill my dream, I might not recognize myself anymore… and then what? It’s unimaginable, but I long to know. If I fulfill my dream, if I let my brilliant light shine, will I change like the fall leaves and then go dormant? What if that’s the end — the end of what I can imagine?
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Longing is the language the inner life speaks in the form of desires, dreams, love, and sacred connection. Longing is the desire to let my light shine, to embody my brilliance.
Loss is the language the ego speaks, and it sounds like fear, doubt, regret, blame, or clinging to the past in order to avoid the present and future. It wants to preserve what was, in an effort to preserve itself.
In my inner life, autumn is the season of beginning, of gestating and birth. In this season, I am choosing to stay and to listen. Listen to the loss, giving it a soft nest in the hollow of a tree trunk. Listen to the longing, giving a nod to the sky, feeling sometimes I am that big, and sometimes I’m even bigger. I choose to stay on an unmarked trail, hearing the music of dry rustling leaves, and trust the GPS in my soul to guide me to the unimagined.
