Hello, Beautiful 2017

Two sparklers

The moon last night looked like a Cheshire cat in the sky, smiling with golden good natured mischief & mystery. I listened to Alice Cooper’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy” & Hall & Oates’ “Rich Girl” loud in the car. My two favorite songs at the moment. I looked out at the streetlamps & the velvety cloak of darkness.

Just like last year, the transition of one year to the next occurs in the center of a sea of changes. Both this year & last year at this time, the sense of a major shift is pervasive. The kind of feeling where everything is changing; all the old ideas & beliefs & paradigms & personas & dynamics & status quos. Worlds open up – stars are born & die in front of you & then born again – everything circles around in the middle of a wind storm.

The seas are rough but able to be navigated. The rain falls hard but they water the flowers. The old things you used to be are slowly fading & shriveling & retreating back into the brush they came from.

Fears were created & fears were put to rest, & ultimately I still ended up with less of them, & more of them simultaneously. Uncertainty. The great fear still remains in the backdrop (happiness) but fears emerged to the front lines (breakdown). But the fears are all quieted in the warmth of humid nights, when it’s all wrapped up in a blanket.

Confidence was built. It was built in each hour I spent in front of those who would judge me & decide the turns my path would take, but I was still the one choosing to be there. Choosing to be judged, so that I may progress. It also showed its face when I actually started asking for what I wanted. I asked him & he said yes. I told them & they were supportive & encouraging. I announced it to them & they wanted to help me & didn’t care that I was turning away at the same time. I decided & they were there. I showed up, & spoke up, for the first time in years.

Showing up. That’s another thing. I watched as those around me were reluctant to take chances. To make choices. To put themselves out there somewhere they might fail. In most failures though, the failure itself is the only worst-case-scenario. If someone says no the world doesn’t stop spinning. & if you don’t try, there’s no way you can ever win. Showing up, in all ways, not just putting yourself out there but also showing up for your own decisions, owning them. Making choices & then making them happen.

I found a home & then it was gone. I reveled in my relief when I walked through your doors. Immediately you took me in. I found your embrace full of love & genuine connection & fun & it gave me something to do & I loved it. Knowing you made all the other things fade away. I thought that I would shrivel when you left me. I didn’t think I could do anything without you. You were like a drug. It was all about me depending on something other than myself & putting all my happiness in it & betting my whole existence on whether you liked me back. I need to stop doing that. When will I realize that happiness will never come from dependency on such anchors? It needs to be mine.

I found my people but then they left me. Slowly they walked out on me & the door closed. They never opened it again. I thought they were the ones that were supposed to make me feel the way I always wanted to feel. I thought the loneliness would go away. Sooner or later, one of us must know that I really did try to get close to you. I tried, & reached out further & more honestly than I ever had, & with deeper vulnerability. But despite finally putting myself out there & trying to make a connection, they turned their backs & went separate ways. I loved you but you didn’t love me back. & I will be okay with that. Somewhere out there I will find my friends.

Colorful whimsical ferris wheel

Also, there were beautiful things. That moment sitting in the golden light of afternoon in the restaurant smiling & feeling like I belonged somewhere for once. New love & new forms of happiness. The home, the memories, friendship – they all still meant something, frozen in time, even if they were no longer the same glowing realms they had been before.

It was a year when I really opened up my hands & reached out & created. I feel like 2016 was like a big educational seminar, teaching me how the world worked & how to ask the questions I needed to ask. A year which required me to make decisions about who I was & who I was going to be. I feel like I learned more this year that probably any other year in recent history.

2016: a year of making magic & of deepening belief in magic, & one where despite some of the painful & darkened challenges that I encountered, I still made it. I survived. It feels like it was a year of growing hope, a stepping stone year, vitally important to be completed & triumphed over before being able to move on to the next open doors.

Open, a concept I tie to authenticity. I want to make 2017 a year of authenticity, & honesty, & freedom. & I want all of those concepts to tie into happiness, to tie into a grander & more wonderful & much more happy + free version of myself.

& so, I open my arms up & my heart up & I make the new year feel comfortable & welcome. I open my heart to let in all the new light through mosaic windows, & open my hands to new creations that must be made. The hope has been built up into a big glowing ball of light, & the music is on, & I am dancing, & I turn now to face the Newness, radical potential, happiness, magic, freedom. I stand tall & proud, looking out at the star-filled sky & the Cheshire cat moon & later, cheerful rays of sunbeams painted across my floor, & I say,

“I’m ready.”

I Don’t Need You To Feel That Way

I Don't Need You to Feel That Way // Ashlee Craft / Assemblage, Issue 8

(from Ashlee Craft / Assemblage, Issue 8)

I thought that without you, I would be a shadow; that I would go back to being what I used to be before I met you. Sad & incapable. I thought of you as the foundation everything I became was built upon. It would crumble if you weren’t there. That the person I had become was dependent on you being there. I looked at the happy, light, euphoric way I felt because of you (who I became because of how you made me feel) & the sense of belonging & being “good enough” that I finally felt. I thought these feelings couldn’t exist without you being with me, like a constant & repetitive circle that required you feeding the fire to keep it going. Eventually though, I realized that what I had become because of you was mine to keep. The feelings & experiences; the things that now made me feel good about who I was; the way I’d learned to love myself – those were things that could not be taken away or forgotten or repressed. This was who I was now; it wasn’t dependent on you validating me or providing a mirror by which I could see myself. It was thanks to you, showing me how to be this person & motivating me to do so, & it was thanks to me, grabbing up & running with these feelings & discoveries, & then building upon them when I had to, in order to become independently happy. I don’t need you in order to feel that way – I really can do it on my own.

wanderings

A Strange Landscape - Ashlee Craft // ashleecraft.com

questions without questions / rewritten words, handed down from the very heights of your understanding, & you tell everyone you know the ineffable & beautiful truth that you feel welling up inside of you / there is still uncertainty, there is still fear, & there are still questions you can’t answer yet / a warm mug of coffee sits on your counter, it is early morning & you are just waking up & everything is just beginning / you realize there are endless roads that are out in front of you now, limitless, you are limitless / to me, it just feels like stagnant energy being lifted, & the clumsiness of the dying & outdated past is being reborn & reshaped into the future, just because there is now room for it to grow into / there is still uncertainty, there is still fear, but it is a tentative step forward / there is still uncertainty, there is still fear, but you are now strong enough to move past

 

Newness

This is My New... // Ashlee Craft / Assemblage, Issue 1 - ashleecraft.com

 

This is all new. This is pure newness & it can be whatever I want it to be. There are no rules, no boundaries, no constraints, no limits. I do what I want. I trust my own judgement because I believe in myself & I know how to trust myself, & I’ve learned recently that it is worth trusting myself. Only I can know what is right for me. Only I know who it is that I need to be, & only I can be the hero of my story.

It all makes sense now, newness does. Changes can be comfortable. It doesn’t have to be as difficult as it seems it will be. Beginnings make sense. Constant personal evolution, constantly being reinvented & reborn, makes sense. It is a matter of survival, of finding true happiness, of embracing life. This is how the tides change in my world. The feeling before newness is conflicted. Endings & beginnings mingling together, the last vestiges of sunlight dissolving & fading slowly, intermingling with the light of the moon, a moon which is illuminated by the next day’s sunlight, & it’s all mixed together in one beautiful palette of color, of things ending so that better things can begin, because we can’t know what these better things ahead of us are until we’re ready to let go of the dock, of the bowlines that keep us tethered there. Of course there are things we should hold onto, & promise ourselves we will never let go of. The things that we truly love, the things that make us happier than anything, the things we know are right. But sometimes we hold onto the old things, the things that weigh us down, the things that are no longer what we need them to be, the things we feel we have to keep under our control when in reality we’d be better off if we let our plans & ideas of the way things are be flexible.

It’s all part of continual personal evolution. Letting go of the things that weigh us down so that we’re free to fly. Letting go of everything that no longer make us feel light & happy & brilliant, because trust me, those feelings are out there, waiting for you, & you will find them if you ruthlessly cut out what doesn’t make you happy & enthusiastically seek what does make you feel happy & alive. You will find it. Tell yourself this whenever you doubt in your ability to reach the full potential you know you have, or are afraid to realize you do have, or worry that maybe you don’t have. Repeat these words, this mantra, every time you think the whole world around you is ending, & you’re thinking that maybe there isn’t possibly a way that you will end up with all the beautiful & brilliant things that you deserve. Tell yourself that you will find it, every time you question if you are in the right place, because right now, you are exactly where you are meant to be, & there are better things ahead. Things will get easier if you keep moving forward. Because sometimes the excellence of a new beginning is hidden among the confusing way that newness can feel, hidden among all the things you no longer are mixing with all the things you are just becoming.

This is your permission to make this whatever you want it to be. You know what is best for you.