This past week and a half, Persephone shook out her hair and covered my corner of the world with blossoms. The crabapple, cherry, and red bud trees accepted Spring’s invitation to the annual dance and donned their finest taffeta. The mornings were a shimmer of fragrant snow, petals catching in the web outside our dining room window, and each day I would watch spellbound from my studio as hundreds of bees made love to pollen-sticky blooms as the rest of the world sped by on the nearby road.
Spring is nature’s Lover, full of beauty and lustful intention; her spell is as transient as youth, but her lesson is deep: After the most brutal of winters, our souls can still fall in love with possibility and bloom into another Self. Too many of us believe that our youthful years are our best, that our cups can never again overflow with accomplishment, inspiration, and juicy desire, but the wisdom is in the blossom herself…her purpose is not to stop us in our tracks with her beauty but to give her very self to tomorrow’s fruit.
As women, we are conditioned to anticipate the autumn and winter of our lives with dread and resolution. In reality, this is what all of our years spin toward and sacrifice for–to finally arrive. In our skins. It is the time of life to stand in our truth, our unapologetic splendor and unfurl our talents and give back.
It is the hour when we gift our lovers with the bare fire of our scarred beauty, beauty that has known change, loss, birth, self-sabotage. It is the luscious moment when we have the ability to live fully in bloom, bearing fruit, and letting go simultaneously. We carry the energy of all the seasons and their sustenance.
Tomorrow, dare to walk through the world wearing the shimmering joy of your soul; laugh too loudly; open the window and let the storm baptize your face; exhale hesitance and inhale new ideas; allow yourself to swim in pleasure, dive into its depths pulsing inside your belly; get drunk on beauty; put flowers by your bed; make a new friend; find a glorious fragrance and fill your day with it; have an affair with frivolity; roll around in bed like a three year old and try to remember your dreams from the night before; talk to a stranger in the produce aisle; listen to the dawn chorus and remember that every minute, every hour, every day is permeated with beginnings.
Be free, beautiful Woman.
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Marlaina Donato is the author of Goddess Consciousness: Women’s Mysticism and Sacred Arts and several other books. Visit her website and online gallery of visionary paintings at: www.MarlainaDonato.com
