An Ode to Sagittarius season

my decay season

It brought me to tears immediately the moment I stopped myself from binge-watching a netflix series because I hadn’t been sure how to confront the hurricane swirling in my chest. I refused to know how. I refused to repeat the same (boring) habit that I had been doing up to that point: sit down, intellectualize my feelings, get to the root of the problems, understand why I feel what I feel. It had helped me at some point, especially in the beginning, but it no longer worked that way. Or I had already outgrown that, maybe? I tried to stop the tears from falling down as I was preparing to go to work. I laughed uglily at the ironic situation of how I was supposed to hold space for others when I was, in fact, the one who needed to curl up and be held the most. I teared up again after the class on my way back home. Driving at night, sobbing so hard that all I could see was blurring traffic lights in my foggy glasses. That the moment I decided that I was done. “I will absolutely, completely and wholeheartedly, give everything up”, I told myself, “I’ve tried everything I could and now the ball is in your court, universe. Every fiber of my being surrenders to you. I will not lift a finger or try to think it through or figure it out whatsoever. You show me the next move.”

K welcomed me into their home with the warmest hug, which she probably had no idea that it meant so much to me as I was navigating a big storm. She taught me how to make the best cauliflower steak I ever had in my life, as well as some basic cooking elements. We talked about all things travel, books, languages and poetry. Observing the way she and her partner looked at each other so genuinely, tenderly and affectionately was like someone lit up the woodstove in the furthest place of my inner world to warm my rigid heart. I knew that I wanted to write something when I came home with the title under the warm light. The next day I went downtown to drop off some stuff for my sister, thinking I could stop at a coffee shop nearby that I had driven past so many times to check it out. Then suddenly I ran into my old coworker that I hadn’t seen for ages. We both were surprised with the timing. That was her first day volunteering at the cafe and that was my first (and probably the only) time I grabbed a chai latte there, because it was quite far away from my home. We talked as if no time had passed and recalled the conversations we used to have back then, under the warm light.

Everything magical happens at the coffee shop, it seems. It reminded me of one time I instantly became friends with a barista, W, when I overheard them telling their co-worker about Gene Keys, which was actually really crazy to me because it had never been that easy to find someone who also knew about this modality. Also at that coffee shop, later on, I met a barista who had the most genuine, brightest, sweetest smile in the world and she looked very much like my teammate when I took the photography program. Somehow it turned out she was a photographer too! Today, I met up with a friend in person for the first time who I had only knew virtually, at a bakery shop, and our conversation brought me so much hope in community and human connection. A proof for how much I craved to lay our hearts bare, stripping away the perfectly crafted armor that we put on because we’re afraid that someone would judge (or fix) us if they saw our flaws. I left realizing I was tasting the real flavor of life for the first time after death. A sense of pure joy and aliveness that I had long buried somewhere in my subconscious land.

Running around playing pickleball with the work team completely for fun and without thinking too much about the rules (did we even care about the rules lol?) brought me back to the sweet old time when I played basketball with my dearest high school friends under the very well-known intense sun of the city of my blood, mostly every single day at noon, when the heat was at peak, without sunscreen and still, we laughed so much that I didn’t even care about my silly appearance. A sudden realization of ah! this is the exact feeling that I missed so much and that I yearned, now being placed on my path again the moment I stopped rejecting my sentimental nature.

I am being called to return to who I was before. Before all the heartbreaks and ocean waves became too much for my fragile heart. Before all the traumatic experiences that led me on this “healing” journey. Return to my purest and truest essence, with the new capacity that I didn’t have back then. Enough to hold compassion for myself to feel the fears and do it anyway. Enough to begin again. Enough to hold multiple truths about myself and embrace all that I am. The capacity I have expanded and continue to do so, to be a human, fully.

My love life (or at least my perspective on that area of life) took an unexpected yet very interesting turn that made me wonder about how boring life would be if that mysterious riddle was easily solved. How terribly boring life would be if everything were completely neat and clean, all figured out, all stayed under control. That’s a dangerous statement to say, I’m aware. But I have clung onto the predictability long enough to realize that avoiding the messy, raw emotions and human experiences just to stay cool and collected is the exact thing that strips the soul, the sense of aliveness away. As many of us already know, joy and suffering are just the two sides of the same coin. We’re not on earth just to “heal” and “learn lessons”. If not about experiencing the whole spectrum of human complexity, finding hope and beauty even in the coldest longest darkest hours, why did we agree to return to this earth by the way?

This is an ode to Sagittarius season. My decay season. The annual shedding that I’ve been observing for 3 years, or maybe a little bit longer than that. As I gave in completely to the agony of my longing, in which my brain had tried hard to convince me that it was merely delusional and impossible, a blazing torch appeared to me in the (seem to be) lifeless cave that no one ever reached.

I realized that torch was mine, I had lit, in a very long time ago where the concept of time and space hadn't even existed. I was the torch and the torch had always been within me. Never left.