15.05.2020

This week's Friday afternoon check in is winging its way to you from a rainy witches cottage on the coast. The wind is whipping off the ocean slinging chills at its shores and the sky is hiding behind thick banks of mottled cloud. The rain droplets are thrumming on my roof and blessing my garden with their landing. I no longer hear the joyful Friday afternoon hum of people finishing up work anymore, the birds picking up the slack with their chorus.For many it has been a shitty week in pandemonia. It happens. Not all days are diamonds darklings and this year is playing hard to get. This recent cluster of days chocked with changes in direction and unsteady new energies that turn us inward can be unsettling. Here must we sit, as has been the case for months now, with ourselves.Whenever we do, what lives within us unresolved rises its weary head and clambers once more for the balm of our loving attention. As kids at school we were taught all kinds of languages in numbers and words and patterns but no one shows us how to speak our own. Our feelings are our very first language and remain a lifelong barometer for those who learn to listen to their secret songs.Proper listening is a kindness that heals all by itself. It is quiet and free from classification or judgement. It doesn't shout over the top or wait only for its turn. It lets silence speak in its own way, expressing what yet lies unsaid. Too often a blessing we reserve only for others and never bestow on our longing selves.Not everything we were taught as kids is useful. Very often childhood only gave us a basic frame of allowable emotion, nothing too over the top or disturbing, none on the dark side of the line. Taught to say we were fine when we were not. Told to stop crying or to be quiet. Instructed implicitly to quell and control unruly emotion without ever wondering what it was really for.It was for you. So you can know your whole truth and come to understand who and how and why you are. It still is for you, even on the days when you don't like how you feel or how life feels to you.So when I ask how you are, I really want to know how *you* are feeling. Not the why or who or how. Just the simple truth of the feelings swirling inside you today, darklings.Art by Demelsa HaughtonWords c. Kerrie Basha 2020