My moods can swing as swiftly as the stars careening through the sky on a cold Alaska evening. Sometimes the pace at which they alter troubles me, but lately not as much as they have in times past. I have this buffer now between my thoughts and corresponding emotions. I can pause for just a brief second before my emotions run roughshod over me leaving me full of remorse or regret.
My emotions have been difficult to cope with since my dad's death. Some days every good emotion was immediately followed with the thought that something bad would happen, and my spirits fells. Other days, no happy feelings existed at all. My chest felt like quicksand sucking thoughts and emotions into it to swirl around in a morass of self pity and even despair.
How does one pull the plug on a tub of quicksand? I don't think you can, but I could do was back fill it feeding more emotion into to create a more stable platform on which to stand.
If my thoughts were negative, I let them pour forth, but not without blessing them with a rational thought or two. For instance, the emotion of sadness was fortified with the thought that I deserved to grieve because grieving made me stronger, honored my father, and if allowed to run its course would allow me to move. I resisted the urge to quell my feelings. The quicksand thickened. The positive nature of my thought words restored the pH balance of my emotions. The quicksand turned to nutrient rich soil wherein happier emotions could take root and produce tender shoots. I tended my new found garden with more positive affirmations turning sadness to contentment. I greeted all emotion with joy letting the feelings wash through me. They collected in the quagmire and were treated with a compost of my own making: a collection of past happy memories of events related to the negative emotions, and a mental picture of how the present sadness would morph into a pleasant future. The quagmire turned to soil and from the soil sprang my favorite ground cover - the dandelion.
You can eat the leaves of the dandelion while they are young and tender. You can harvest the roots and consume them as well in a tea infusion. Dandelions excel at surviving. When the soil beneath them begins to run fallow, they will kick into overdrive and produce flowers in great abundance. Those flowers transform into the most beautiful fuzzy tendrils with seeds at the ends of their lengths. When the winds pick up, the dandelions produce some sort of chemical that relaxes the follicles holding the seed stems, and they are released into the wind. The wisps on the seed stems are perfect air foils and the seeds are carried to far reaches in the hopes that at least some of them will find ripe soil in which to grow.
Dandelions do not horde their life energy. They instinctively know to release the bounty of their offspring to chance. All life is chance, and no amount of clinging to it will change that fundamental concept. My life is extraordinary, and what I have experienced, good and bad, should be released. The seeds of my emotions and thoughts will not be corralled into tiny pockets of memories to be stored forever as personal treasures. Each thought must be free to compliment each emotion. Memories must be pliable enough to transformation lest negative ones grow unabated into pools of quicksand that cannot support new life, or positive ones become monuments to joys that can never be matched causing regret to the heart that holds them.
I release the bounty of my life to the wind, and I laugh as they climb unfettered into the atmosphere that has sustained my breath. Who knows where they will land and into what substrate they will take root, or even if I will witness that burst of life or gentle withering. Even the withered ones will replenish the soil upon which they landed, and even in passing they will provide nourishment. I am content for now just to witness them dance and whirl about me as they do what all life must do - change. I can stand upon my once unstable patch of quicksand and know that I have stepped back to allow the Master Gardner to do His work, and that I need not fear being sucked down into its depths. I am free, happy and blessed.
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