Dealing with separation and loss.

My love-affair with Bearded Daddy had a tragic beginning - a fall of a beloved community and loss of friends on a heart-breaking scale. The first years of our life together were shadowed by the presence of my despair and agony, loss of soul and eventually depression. It took me four years to find and collect the lost pieces of my soul and become a whole person again.

There was plenty of magic at work and never have I been so happy to be a pagan. There is a multitude of books dealing with the loss of soul and recovering from trauma. Besides Starhawks Dreaming the Dark and Pagan Book of Living and Dying, I read through Caitlín Matthews' Psychic Shield and Singing the Soul Back Home and my ever faithful friend Francesca De Grandis provided me with the prayers and spells my numb soul needed to come back to life. (In her books Be a Goddess and Goddess Initiation - I've never had the honor of meeting this lady in person.)

Now I'm facing the loss again. This time better prepared by work I did previously. This time fiercely determined not to loose my life and my soul again for so many years. Yes, it is hard. Yes, I can feel the coldness of losing soul creeping up on me. Not quite being present, not quite being able to listen to people for all the inner talk going on. Loosing sense of self and the sacred flame within.

Yet it was me, who two years ago visited the underworld in a shamanic journey, found a glacier and Audhumla liking it clean. There, preserved inside the ice was - me. A huge part of my soul that had escaped during the break-up of our first home. I was the one who dug myself out, my fists bleeding, from the ice. I was the one who could fulfill and complete my-self. There in the underworld we danced and danced, until we were only one person. I came back whole and happy, finally together.

Now I'm confident with the knowledge that I will always find the pieces of me that might go missing. Some parts need to leave to be safe. The rest is tough and hardened like and old dragon. I sleep with one eye open, curled around the home and my children, protecting and guarding. I know Bearded Daddy has had six years to learn where the soft spots are, where to hurt and how to wound. Luckily I have also learned to keep them protected, learned to heal myself and like all snakes, repair the damage by being re-born.

The gift of the wild is within me - that which falls is never gone, that which dies is never lost - it is only hidden and sleeping like flower bulbs in the dark covers of earth waiting for the Kiss from Maiden of Spring. We go through our pain and suffering to come back stronger, wiser, more compassionate and ever more alive.

Am I sad? To the point of choking. Am I grieving? The world seems to darken around me. Am I hurt? I'm bleeding out. Yet within me is the wisdom and the strength needed to see this through.

The wind still blows - my blood still flows and within me the eternal song - calling my soul back home.