I went out for dinner with three beautiful women, powerful, intelligent, heart loving women. It was night and getting late, the Cafe had the roof rolled open so I could see the sky. It was such a hot night that any breeze was a respite.
As I sat there sweating and drinking my beer, a Cicarda flew in and landed on the spine of my back, directly over where my heart resides. It landed heavily as a insect of its weight would do. I sat there knowing that something important had arrived and I asked my girlfriend to see what it was. She leaned into my body and shooed it away and told me it was a cicada and in an instant I knew it was a black one, my favourite of them all.
This tiny moment in time was not lost to me as I have come to learn that life is communicating with me all the time. It meant nothing except that a Cicarda landed on my back that night. However I looked for a different meaning in that moment. I looked and I found a symbol, a metaphor for the place I find myself at this moment in the map of time.
The Cicarda lives for many many years silently underground. up to 17 years they will lay dormant. There are parts in me that have lay dormant for an eternity, parts that are underdeveloped, immature and have a quickening to catch up with the rest of this powerful soul that I am. like a cicada, I choose my own timing to emerge. I judge my timing as too long, not quick enough and yet I know that the quiet underground is where most of my spiritual work takes place if I am to be a person with roots, with substance.
My back has been aching for weeks now. Not an obvious, I need to go get a massage, but a mild ache that is not pinpointed in the skin but in the memory cells. I feel my heart breaking again, in different ways, but no less scary, exposing my softness, my rawness, my freshness and it terrifies me for I do not have a crystal ball and life desires me to trust if I am to leave my shell high and dry.
I feel the hardening around my heart that has been built up through lost love, the war over children and the hardening of mistrust, I feel it demanding to fall away so my heart can break again and again and again. I am terrified and I also know that I called for this life of shell cracking. Cicardas are a call to introduce new love but only through the shedding of the skin of anything old. the cellular memory must be left behind in the old shell. Love of myself, deep new love of myself and love of another and others.
My voice desires uncovering and amplifying. My belief tells me my song is so loud it can be deafening, I feel like my call will be too much, too loud and noisy that I am accused of drowning out others song and told that my volume would be better served, turned down, less intense. I do not want to be made wrong for my volume, for my intensity. My incessant drumming for love, like a broken string is essential to my nature as I love deeper and deeper myself and others and yet I desire to clarify my message so that I can be heard amongst the din.
When love is everything then we must do everything for love. Speak up, speak out, make a stand for my yes and my no and my requests to be cared for and to be taken seriously. My call to the other cicada women and the raven men to stay awake and risk being eaten in the calling and call anyway.
Ancient tale says that Cicardas were easily enchanted fairy/nympth like humans that danced for so long that they died and were offered a new incarnation. As sweet as that imagery is, it is me, it is me, it is me.
Cicardas are said to be the symbol of a good rebirth, resurrection, a transition, a time of great change. This is true for me in a way unlike no other time. It is subtle, it is subversive and yet no less powerful then all the more blatant transitions of my life. Now it works and weaves its changes in my souls landscape, in the shape of my breathing heart, in the imagery that drinks me and the deep yearnings I am acknowledging have always been there.
Now is my time to arrive and reveal myself and be unapologetic about my right to be here for this fleeting and urgent life. To love myself in ways I didn’t know love existed, love in the acceptance of who I am in any one given moment with my messiness, my grace, my falling over and my waves. now is my time like no other and it is too important to fuck around with. My window is here to be reborn entirely anew.
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