But you do. Your anchors keep you in place. Anchors like these. The sound of chamomile tea brewing, nightly, sipping slowly silently in the threshold of another day ending. All is well.
Preparing your favourite curry like a magician meticulously mixing her concoction – cutting the vegetables, fiercely, dropping the spices in with abundance. The colours are melting together: rich yellow turmeric like gold, earthy browns and soothing oranges from the cumin, coriander, fiery reds from the chilli, heart opening. The ginger is fresh and solid. These smells bring you home somehow, home to a place you’ve never yet been. A place your soul yearns for with belonging, a home faraway that’s cooking right there today, under your nose.
Then the song whose rhythms and drums ground you into being, the one that always makes your body undulate into a dance. You spend hours dancing like this.
The endless baths in sizzling hot water. Sinking and floating, accompanied by spoken words of poets and mystics, speaking their truths, listening to stories until your skin is red raw, saturated with warmth and awe. You keep dipping your head in and out, it’s almost the sea.
The grandiose tree you love weekly, leaning against his unyielding trunk, your feet bare on his roots, the river singing summer songs. You sit here and just breathe. Just breathe.
You maybe dropped who you were: the masks, the acting, the pleasing. The accommodating that hid so much brokenness, keeping quiet and moulding yourself like a chameleon around Others.
You’re no longer that. And maybe you don’t know who you are anymore. Yet your anchors are the signposts of what is left after so much shedding. Your anchors are reminders of the core of your being, of what is still there, in you, and always will remain.
In so much changing, seek to remember the things that are enduring; honour the empty spaces that will birth new life, new ideas, new loves. Honour the scarred spaces that attest this is where I was trapped and made it out, this is where I was hurt and healed.
We seek too often to fill the emptiness with something, with anything, to define ourselves hurriedly. Brew longer in the disorientation of self, allow the empty space to echo for longer and your loneliness to deepen even further. Despite this monotony you feel, grasp tightly onto your anchors, onto the smells, the feelings, the sensations, the sounds of your daily living. The winter within you never seems to end, but it is the way of the creation, the rising and falling, the death and rebirth – Trust in the cyclical nature of things. One day, joy will be your unexpected guest.
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