He’s almost died…nearly five to six times.
We count the near-misses on his 96th birthday over his ardent request for caramel cake.
Pneumonia, a misfired pistol, a spooky accident while flying his WWII bomber plane, a burst appendix, enemy fire…maybe we’ll include the year 2020, too.
When asked the lessons he’s gathered along the journey, my grandfather Chuck swiftly responds with this advice: “Be truthful.”
His words find me while I sit tall at my desk and gaze at a winter day that breathes bright and blue.
My eyes bathe in the craved appearance of clear sky. I didn’t realize my longing for the light until the light reappears. Sun breaks through the scattering of clouds, and above the clouds there’s a thumbnail of a crescent moon.
I catch the moon in the morning. She must know I’m more of a morning person and our enthusiastic greetings occur with coffee, hot water stirred with lemon juice, a journal open and patiently waiting, a flickering candle.
New Moon in Capricorn invites a return and a reclaiming of our earthly power. Time to examine and plant seeds for professional and long-term goals, the ones that need grounded patience to take proper root to grow.
The intention I send to the moon centers on a life-vision, an implemented way of being, one outside of career, but will assist in the professional sphere as well as the personal.
Honestly, this is the reason I am home, why I have traveled back to my childhood home, to my Kentucky roots to free a blockage, to tend to a long-ago wounding that has shaped me, silenced me, suppressed me.
Even in Texas, thousands of miles away, I continued to play out this constriction, this fear-fueled condition. I see my life mirroring a former chapter and realize that I will repeat this until I dig up the kernel of mistruth.
And the decision to uncover, to liberate brings me here. So I look up into the Kentucky blue sky and send an intention to the New Moon in Capricorn. And my intention is inspired by a Capricorn – my grandfather’s counsel to be truthful.
I take the advice into the hum of my high heart. Add a twist.
Emotional Liberation.
I call on the supportive cosmos to help me in integrating an emotional honesty, one that truth-tells on my pain and my joy.
Because it takes courage to express and own our joy, and it takes great courage to allow the full-range of our grief, our pain, our healing.
This is my earthy power, this is my reclaiming, this is my long-term goal so I can move through this world in integrity, in honesty, in respect for myself and how I am truly feeling.
In reflection, I see that all my challenges, my so-labeled problems, stem from a lack of expression, from suppressing my emotions in the fear that I will not be received and loved if I show all of me. But a bottled emotion only grows stronger and sooner-rather-than-later, the truth swirling in that suppressed emotion erupts and causes confusion and hurt, and longer recovery time for me.
Emotional liberation occurs as I learn the language of emotions, befriend their emergence, expansion, evaporation or evolution to the next, and allow the fullness of all emotions, and critically accept my current emotional reality.
And I can feel the sensations of an emotion, remaining present and embodied, and reign as a witness, a relaxed and attentive observer. I do not become my emotions and I do not resist them. My emotions emanate in-the-moment intelligence I can incorporate to better support myself and my inner and outer workings.
Knowing this is one thing. Practicing this emotional befriending is another.
And so sitting at my childhood room’s desk, clouds scurrying across a blue drenched sky, I tap. I speak my emotions out-loud. I practice emotional freedom technique to acquaint myself with my emotions in the moment, to let them be seen, heard, voiced. I tap on my wrists, eyebrows, collarbones and as I do, I stretch my emotional vocabulary, identifying the emotion and how it ripples and resonates in my body.
Be truthful.
I am. The density, the discomfort can be seen in radical belonging and breathed through.
And as I tap, as I speak, there’s a sudden flight of two vultures, and the expanse of their wings soars hope straight into my heart.
And I need that pop of hope.
Just like I needed that sight of blue sky, I need hope to lean into as I make the effort to be emotionally liberated so that overtime, this too will become second-nature; like those elegant creatures of flight, they glide without expensing energy in trying to climb. They flow with the currents at peace in the bigger perspective of life.
I think of my grandfather, how he lifted up and floated over his life to acknowledge the times death almost swooped in, and discerning the grander themes, the ones to carry back down to share while eating caramel cake.
Be truthful. Be emotionally free. Look to the sky for the peak of promising blue and light, to birds for the higher perspective. And, of course darlings, enjoy the cake.