The Transition is not smooth

I’m 45, not old but not young. A weird in-between place made even weirder by trauma and near death. I’ve spent the past 10 years since my accident, pulling the threads of myself and trying to weave them into some sort of coherent cloth. A cloth that serves to honour who I am now but also allows me to be ‘out there’ in the world.

Have I been successful? Well that depends on when you ask me. I may have found myself and learnt to love and respect myself but the bit about functioning in the world is not something I think I’ve figured out yet. Or maybe I have and most others are doing it wrong?

Just when I’d righted the ship and learnt to have balance in amongst the turmoil of heavy grief and post traumatic stress I am once again being thrown into the initiation of change with Perimenopause.

I’m suddenly lost in the woods again.

The feelings that are getting unearthed are a throwback to those early days of trauma, a mixture of feeling aimless, hopeless and alone. I’m not sure I’m ready for another rite of passage through the fire. The last one was so hard and so hollowing. Am I full enough to be emptied again?

There are moments of clarity where I know that this is another transition from one state to another, an induction to my elderhood and like all initiations it will not be easy. I would like to walk this path without treating it like a disease to be medicated and bypassed, instead letting it power through me and take me to those corners of myself that still need revealing.

Things feel so full of paradox right now, I find I’m craving community, to talk with wiser souls than mine about what is to come but I’m also longing for solitude, for the cave walls to shut me in and free me when I’m ready to unfold. I know myself yet so unsure of who I am at the same time. Happy standing still but yearning to move forward to something.

The pull of The Hermit making me root down and the call of Cailleach pushing me to shed another skin and inhabit the body of the wise woman who I still can’t quite find.

So here I go again, becoming an edgewalker once more. Neither here nor there. Setting off through the trees, the Fools journey, tentative, unknowing and vulnerable.