Recently, with shifting circumstances in my life, stretching myself between town and mountain and not feeling exactly at home anywhere, imagining how to get my mountain home ready to be a rental – which means removing personal items from living spaces – I keep having this psychological sense of a vast void. It is hard to describe, and has not been that obvious to me why it is there. Internally it feels like inhabiting big empty spaces, very Zen in one way, very disconcerting in another.

A good friend brought to my attention today an issue that I had nicely tucked away in my psyche, having put a period on the end of it. Over, done with that. The story is written, conclusions reached, the book closed. He was insightful enough to point out that the story is my little “dogma.” As such, if I am to practice what I believe, it has to be questioned. So out it came for serious review. Within a couple of hours I had developed a fever. It was the tipping point for several things, I suppose.

Now I understand the void a little better, however. A void. Avoid. I have created a void by avoiding this issue. I have not been present to it.

On Good Friday my friend Ali and I did a Letting-Go ritual by the stream. I had been thinking of all that Jesus let go of on Good Friday – a lot, a lot – so it occurred to me that it was a good day to ask for help with letting go of old things. We named them together, sent them downstream and washed each other in the water. Now this old thing is shaking loose from my psychic space. It had been so much a part of the wallpaper I didn’t even see it, I needed a reflecting partner to help with that.

Now possibly something can wash in to that void, something living, fresh and new. A new dance rather than the stance of avoidance. Ritual is powerful medicine and magic.