Accepting the space between your own highest self and current self, and beginning to live as the center of your own universe.
Sun peaks over the mountains here in the Valley just before 6am. Beloved and I wake up around 5, with ample time to crawl through our morning in the dark. Eyes half-sleepy and half-open, hot coffee and tea warming the tips of our noses as we fumble into each other trying to find our way into words in our journals. Outside the moon still shines sometimes in some far-off place, and it still feels as though we have a bit of an edge on the day. These quiet moments are the time to craft what the day will look like, feel like, become.
When the sun begins to find its way to us, it first casts a warm and oceanic glow into the sky; a blue so mesmerizing and rich, that it feels as if it is looming before something much grander than a typical day - if there is such a thing. J diligently reminds me each morning to be thankful that we woke up with all our limbs and senses, so it’s already a ‘great day’. But I, a bit excited and a bit daunted, watch the blue turn to yellow then white, while the mountains reflect back sun ways off their snowy peaks, and I wonder if it is that the day is stronger and overpowered the night. Or if it consented to this change of consciousness, the hours of rest needing their own rest.
And I wonder, hot coffee in hand and my beloved’s hand on my thigh while we drive him to work before 6, who will show up to live my day for me. Will it be my best, my highest, my greatest good. Will I impress myself with my accomplishments and as I say farewell to night, will I greet her again with something she’d be proud of as we lay our heads down again tonight. Or will it be something that only feels more constant. A self that has shown up more often than my best; someone who feels under pressure at work, a bit ever-dejected for her offbeat character, someone in constant questioning of her worth and place here between sun and moon. Wondering whether it’s safe to live as though they both revolve around me (as we all have the freedom to believe) or if they even know I exist.
It’s always been fascinating to me, the distance between best selves and current selves. Like sun and moon, they seem dependent on one another in some intangible but gravitational way; how can the best self be imagined without the current self? And which one is more real if never they are in the same sky at the same time? On our hardest days, they appear to work in opposition; light to darkness, night to daytime. Like dueling polar opposites, nearly mocking each other and us, caught in the middle knowing we aren’t resonating with what is happening in and around us in the moment. We get stuck, reaching from a middle place of not attaching and consenting to the current self, but not able to access the highest self.
But when I relax, and today will certainly not be one of the days I do so, I realize I am both. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will loosen my tight grip and notice that in being neither, I am both. In not confining myself to exist only in the daylight or nighttime, only in shadow or in brilliance, I am the expression of all these directions and everything between them. The light of my best is what illuminates that of my worst, that is to say, awareness of my flaws from my highest self’s perspective is what enlightens me to the fact that these are not flaws at all, but lovable individualities and idiosyncrasies. The craters to my moon that make it so magnificent.
When next the sunrise or sunset finds you and asks you to pause, I hope only that you take his lesson of radiance and reflect that light to her. When next the moon shines outside the corner of your car windshield, I hope you take her invitation to shine awareness - and love, and compassion, and all things of the light - onto whatever you have defined as flawed or imperfect or downright unacceptable about yourself. That which you have damned and banished to your own shadows. And I pray that in the space between moon and sun, your best and your worst, where you’d like to be and where you are in this moment, you accept your power to assume all this love and power and wonder does revolve around you and is only waiting for you to begin and orbital dance with it, in forever motion forward toward more growth and presence and, ultimately, love.
Questions for self-reflection:
What does your life revolve and orbit around?
When was the last time you saw both the sun and moon in the sky?
How does it feel to believe, if only temporarily, that the sun and moon revolve around only you?
Does it scare you to be the center of attention of your own life?
Can you accept that they do so out of love for you?
