It’s late Thursday evening as I am writing to you.
And the dark of the night makes for a deeper connection between us.
It’s almost as if we slightly step out of space so we are closer together.
It will be morning when you are reading this letter, night when I am writing it, and so we meet at dawn.
Dawn has always been a sacred time, a non-local world between the sleeping and the wake. The light and the dark. The spoken and the unspoken.
The things that make us. And unmake us.
Grief. Love.
Remembering. Forgetting.
It is the place where loneliness and solitude reside side by side without touching.
The place where impossible things exist.
Unearthly worlds. Unimaginable lives.
But somehow, this place of dawn, the in between day and night, makes everything less earthly. Less humanly. More outwardly.
I often found grief to feel both heavier and lighter there.
It feels as if we know we can endure it but we also know it’s torture.
During that time we can believe in both fairies and science.
In healing but also in the infinity of life’s hardship.
I don’t think, though, I could have felt the specialness of dawn if I had not been touched by grief. Dawn without deep loss is just a place semi-dark.
Nothing magical to it.
Life without loss is also just a place.
Nothing magical to it.
In Michael Collin’s book Carrying the Fire (the third astronaut on the Apollo 11 mission) he says,
“There seems to be two moons now, the one I see in my backyard and the one I remember from up close.
Intellectually I know they are one and the same but emotionally they are separate entities.”
I know you and I have not gone to the moon, but in many ways losing someone we love is as life changing as seeing the moon up close.
It resembles Michael Collins’ two moons experience.
After loss. We have two views. Two lives. Two selves. (Click to tweet!)
But if you ask me, at dawn they become one.
They find their way to each other and blend in.
Grief becomes life, dark becomes light.
And just like that, there is no duality, not duplicity and certainly no extremes, just us and the moon waiting for the sun.
Preparing ourselves for the day ahead.
Today, remember how incredibly lucky we are to see two moons instead of one, to carry the fire within us, and maybe even to have the power to put it all back together at dawn.
With carrying fire at dawn,
Christina
P.S. Read the books, listen to the podcast, and live a life full of moons.
