Fearless

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve.  The last day of 2014.  The wrapping up of this year and the preparation to welcome a new one.
I have spent many years as an anxious mess around New Years.  Fear would wrap itself around my heart and squeeze tight until I wanted nothing more than to go to bed and wake up sometime mid-February.  Beyond the flurry of resolutions and high hopes for a new year, new self, new life.
My fear was so thick, so real, so intense, that I hated this time of year. I would begin looking over the months behind us and then realize that one of these years I will face loss… one of these new years celebrations will mean that I leave behind a year that held someone I love and walk forward into a new year that won't hold that person inside of it.  I would struggle to exhale, knowing that someday, some year, loss will inevitably come.

2012 was the year loss came to my doorstep. The year I lost in grand proportions; the year I walked out of a year that held someone I loved and into a new year without him.  Two new year's eves later, I am here. Standing. Strong.  I bear scars and have lost some innocence I needed to shed.  My eyes are wide open to hurt that can strike harshly from the belly of one you called lover, and my heart is both flung wide open to beauty as well as guarded against anything that smells anything like what I've experienced before.  I've walked through the darkest forest of grief and come through into the dawn. I've hurt and bled and raged and numbed out and here I am.  I'm not afraid anymore.  I feel the fibers of my being pulled taut in strength, reverberating with the awareness that I can do hard things.  I can be slashed and bruised and torn, but not defeated.  I have the wide open awakening that life comes to each of us, but the places of darkness and wounding need not be the end of ourselves… in fact, I feel reborn, new, thankful and grateful to get to sift out the excess filth to uncover the beauty that was waiting for me underneath.  I feel the sun living in my chest, the full life that comes not from money, or an easy life, but from the deep knowing that come what may, I will be ok.  I can do this life.  I can take a beating and rise again. I am enjoying myself in ways never afforded to me inside of a relationship that was more than a little off kilter.  I am free to explore what it is that brings me joy, and the more light that pours inside of me spills out into my children.  I find my delight in their faces. They see my contentment and snuggle into that safety like a warm cocoon.  They have watched me navigate hurtful and difficult things and keep moving.  They are learning through my dark forest that pain isn't something to be afraid of, but to be stared down and plowed through.

This New Year's Eve I will stand in the light of the midnight moon and throw my arms open wide. I welcome 2015, knowing as a sage that it will bring brokenness as well as joy. It will hold confusion, sadness and hurt, but it will also be bursting with newness and opportunity and places to dive deeper into this life that was gifted to me.  I can't wait to unwrap it and savor what it holds.