I’ve been sick this week. Please enjoy my feverish Friday the 13th (holy day of the goddess) reflections…

Those thick dark hands of the cosmos wrap around mine. They are sparkling with milky stars. The great mystery lifts my body up to get a good look at me. Delicately stretch me out limb to limb between her thumb and index finger. I droop like a hammock, open and ready to be filled. The light of the sun reflects off my spine. I am glowing here. And there are some places where the light passes through me, where I’ve worn thin like an old, well loved cloth. “This one is holy”, she says in wind language that surrounds my body. “This one is ready.”

I didn’t get this way by accident. The softening is earned. An agreement made with no sense of future reward. An agreement that says: yes, I will open even though I know it means I am not safe from further pain. I will not harden to it. I will not make my life, my bones, a sanitary fortress. I will not withhold. I will not say, “if I let myself feel this sadness fully, I better be repaid in equal joy”. I will not make bargains that hold me hostage from that sweet ache of being alive.

It is the season of ghosts. I’ve been haunted lately by numerous ghosts of the past. Luckily, I never grew into a fear of ghosts. They arrive in different forms: in my body, a person, a feeling, or some shape I don’t have words for. Some unloved, unknown, mostly forgotten woman in me drifts or sometimes claws her way to the surface. She is ready. She is holy. She has been softened. A ghost is a spirit who’s time has come, but they (or you) don’t know it yet.

To know the ghosts is to free them. Let them rise and be plucked from earth by those soft fingers of Her mystery. The dark, black everything will stretch you wide to love. She will see how well you have worked your wounds, washed them, kept them, cooed to them, and finally, let them float up to Her hands. She will shine light that is beyond the sun, beyond the stars, beyond the moon, into you. She will whisper nectar into your holes, where you have worn thin. And you will begin to shine like Her. Like magic. You will be holy. You are already holy.