It is no easy feat, this thing we call being human. 

 

They say angels don’t experience the intensity of human emotion. To be human means to have a uniquely and intensely emotional experience. To be human means to wade into the darkness. Sometimes gently, and at other times chaotically cannonballing headfirst into the depths. 

 

There’s nothing elegant about it. But the messiness is oh-so-real. As my shamanic teacher, Amy, used to say, “sometimes it just feels good to be a hot mess.” 

 

To be human is to encounter chaos, pain, hurt. It is also to know beauty, tenderness, awe.

 

It is to do and also to be. To achieve and also to fail. To be courageous and also to hide.

 

To ebb and to flow. To love and to hate. To grow and to heal.

 

To dream and to hope, and then to lose faith and question the meaning of it all.

 

To stand proudly at the top of the mountain peak, and then to trip and fall flat on our faces.

 

To wish we had more time, and to also wish it would be over soon.

 

It is the yin and the yang. The tension that creates this existence, the balance that underlies this thing we call being human. There is nothing truer and more ever-present than the fact that life will contain this constant dance of opposites. It’s a chaotic balance, for sure. 

 

Cracked, Refined, Revealed.

And in this tension of opposites, we are not only cracked open so that the light can get in, we are refined. Polished like the diamond from immense heat and pressure, created anew like the pearl from a thousand tiny irritations. 

 

Sometimes life just seems like one big process of being born as you truly are, forgetting, making questionable choices (great, another “learning opportunity”), and spending decades trying to find that true self again. 

 

We will shed many skins in this lifetime if we really lean in and embrace the messy chaos of it all. And just like the snake, we will emerge clearer each time, more colorful – brighter. In the end, our true self isn’t something to be found, only something to be revealed. It is not so much a seeking of the light that we must engage in then, but a “simple” remembering of the spark of light we inherently are. 

 

But simple doesn’t always mean easy.

 

I came into this world convinced 

that finding the light 

was the goal; 

but instead discovered that 

it is in the darkness 

that we find 

our Soul.

 

///

 

Humaning is hard. (Let’s make it fun.) Join us at Enlightened, Apparently