The bridge between personal and collective healing.
When we are struggling, it’s never just ours. Nothing is just ours. Our shadows are not just our shadows. Our wounds are not just our wounds. Our struggles and our stories are not just ours — we are all bound. There is an undeniable bridge between our personal healing and the collectives.
We are all affected by one another and we are all affecting everybody else.
We are all being pulled by the cycles within us, by the cycles of our loved ones, our lifetime, generation, and lineage, and we are all being pulled by the cycles of the earth, the collective consciousness, and the cosmos. None of us are in this lived experience of wonder and challenge alone. When things get the darkest, when things feel the most hopeless, or challenging it can feel tremendously isolating and lonely but we are never going through anything alone. We are all experiencing a different hue, or a different flavor in varying degrees from the same spectrum.
Our lives, pain, struggles, and success are not comparable to anybody else — this is not the point. The point is to realize everything we experience is a symptom or a mirror of something greater that we are all part of.
We are all indoctrinated into societal and cultural structures and contracts that are inescapable. None of us are immune to the vastness of the human experience. All of us are undeniably dependent upon the earth and we cannot be separated from the great Mother.
Whether we struggle with depression, anxiety, addiction, self-hatred, or harm, these struggles never just stem from our own issues, these struggles are a byproduct of the world and environment we are embedded in.
If we fear using our voice, invoking conflict, or are terrified of the messy wildfire of our hearts to say and express what we really think and feel this fear isn't just from our personal experiences. The complexities in our relationships are mirrors of systemic wounds and fractures in intimacy, vulnerability, support, hierarchy, and safety.
Whether we are longing for love, acceptance, community or sovereignty, and whether we are struggling in isolation or partnership, motherhood, sisterhood, with our careers, with making money, or meeting our basic needs, or whether we are dealing with the impact of the violation or violence against our bodies, we are not alone. These are pains of humanity.
Greed, violence, scarcity, hate, judgment, divisiveness, and injustice are all symptoms of collective wounds gone septic, and grief, heartache, loneliness, death, tragedy, and powerlessness are all part of the human experience.
Our shadows and our experiences are a symptom or a reflection of the collective orchestration we live in.
Please, please, please, grieve and address your heartaches on a personal, individual level — you must. And open your eyes to also see your experiences and circumstances as part of something larger that nobody is immune to — not to excuse, bypass, or minimize, but to better understand.
We are all trying to take care of ourselves, meet our needs, and tend our wounds, and our world is not set up for that to organically take place in a perfect and just manner. This is true on a basic, survival level, and on an existential level. Because of this, we are all scrambling to some degree, and it is inevitably messy. But what if part of the human experience was always meant to include the wisdom that comes from dancing with the reality of this? What if the gifted sight we all need comes from the reality of having to dance with the insecurity of life, and the impossibility of immunity to violence, tragedy, and loss? What if the wisdom we need to embrace the gift of life, is to see how beautiful, and how wonderful the wonder and beauty is in contrast to the dark?
Even if this is true, even if the dark is always bound to be there — we should still strive for world peace, to end hunger, cure cancer, and save the earth as long as we don’t become cynical and bitter, hardening our hearts in the process. We should dream the biggest dreams possible, as long as our happiness doesn’t depend on them coming true. We should believe in true love, whether we find it or not because we definitely never will if we always have one foot out the door.
There is a titration between the dark and light in this world, and a titration between seeing the collective complexity, and our individual experience as a way to tend peace and contentment amid this grande complexity. If we fight to deny the hard truths of this world, and if we try and be bigger than gravity, and death, if we try and control the things we can’t control and assure ourselves of things that can’t be assured we will only feed our suffering. But looking at life straight in the eyes knowing that there are no guarantees — this can grant us a well of tenderness, gratitude, and embrace for all that we do have.
We aren’t all guaranteed shelter, food, and clean water. We can't be guaranteed safety. We won’t live forever, we’re aging as we speak, and our vitality will decline. Our hearts will be broken and they will stop beating one day. We will experience hate and violence most likely before we meet our last day if we haven't already, and we will make mistakes, and regrets, and things are bound to happen that we will wish we could take back.
If we can't see the water we're swimming in it's a lot harder to move through our individual experiences. I don’t speak to the dark to give it a pedestal, I speak to the dark because it’s there, and it's helpful to make peace with it.
We live in a ruthless society that pushes us to do more, tells us that we are never good enough, and that our worth and loveability all depend on external factors that have nothing to do with simply who we are. We live in mortal bodies, on an earth with finite resources, and systemic hierarchies, and life is fleeting and fragile even in its resilience.
It’s important to acknowledge the collective darkness or heaviness — and it’s just as important to come back closer to home and see the light. See the kindness, generosity, love, vulnerability, richness, abundance, healing, and magic that is very much alive everywhere. See the beauty and the tenderness of life that is in everything.
Allow your hurts the space to be felt wildly, and make sure you simmer in what you do have too — when the timing is right of course. It’s important to see compassion next to hate. It’s important to see beauty next to disgrace. It’s important to see birth and new life next to death, and blessings next to tragedy and loss. This doesn’t take away the magnitude of challenge, but it can make it even the tiniest bit easier to digest. It can make it the tiniest bit easier to orient into the wild world we are a part of.
What is ours is never just ours.
We are all living in this messy world where pains and insecurities get ugly, project and act out, and where life throws us curveballs. Nothing makes absolute sense, and we also all live in this world where wild magic and beauty are indeed alive.
Our work is to allow what is there to be felt, and it’s also to embody the beauty of this world, and this life into our sweet and fiery beings. Let yourself be moved. May we become vessels for the beauty just as much as the sorrow. May we see ourselves as an extension of the earth. May we let her wash us clean and bless her with our love. May we see ourselves as part of the collective consciousness, collective wisdom, and collective healing, and bring our light and our gold to the surface and let it shine. Awaken to your radiance, and set it free. Let your awakening, be an awakening for all. Let your liberation, holy rage, and reclamation be for you, and be for all. Give your attention to tending joy, tending love, tending gratitude, presence, and pleasure for yourself, and inspire this as a priority for those around you. What if that was the revolution our world was waiting for?
When the darkness hits us it’s quite palpable, and sometimes we turn away, contract and avoid it. But the biggest invitation of noticing I want to leave you with today is to notice where the light is, the pleasure, joy, love, and things to be grateful for and in awe of — where are you turning cheek in busyness, distraction, and obligation instead of giving your full presence to that?
We as individuals impact the collective consciousness.
Every move we make and thought we have ripples out. Play your part. Shine your light. Claim your power. Cherish the earth. Cherish one another. Choose trust, not in naiveté but by choice. Slow down, protest the hustle, protest the hardness and contraction. Protest scarcity, and competition. Know your worth, honor your boundaries, and your capacity, and cherish your desires. Our individual healing is part of the collective healing. If you need to grieve, grieve. If you need to be angry, be angry. Don’t be a puritan and filter yourself to a pulp in ignorant righteousness. Let this collective energy move and transmute, and offer it all up to the Goddess.
The bridge between personal healing and collective healing is that what is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine. Do not deny the dark when it is there, but make sure you are seeking the gold.
Follow the pulse in your body and your heart. Trust what is moving through you, and let it move you. Allow yourself to be led by a wisdom greater than your understanding. Choose light. Choose pleasure. And don't deny the discomfort when it's there. Let your heart unravel as it will and passion unfurl as it does. Trust the process, follow the thread, and be carried by the current.
With love,
Abby and the Marigolds
