"The language of the Selkies is loss."
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This year has been so strange and beautiful. It's been a year of phenomenal business growth and personal milestones.
At the same time, it's also been a year of loss - in the past two months, I've lost two presences in my life who I love so very much. They've also happened at the most challenging times: when I was hosting an overseas pod retreat, and today just before I headed off to teach a mermaid workshop. My grieving process has therefore been interesting - compartmentalizing to an almost savage degree, smiling and carrying on because my ethos has always been "the show must go on", being distracted by work and responsibilities for a little while - then cycles of spontaneous, inappropriately-timed, unbelievable pain.
People talk about getting over death. But I am slowly beginning to understand that loss is like a Selkie's sealskin. It seeps into your bones, wraps around your soul like a cloak. Sometimes you forget it's there. Other times, you feel its weight like wings of iron. But whatever it is and is not, it becomes an irrevocable, irreversible part of who you are.
Some days you can slip it off, leave it puddled on the rocks for a time while you gambol carefree on the shores. Sometimes you might even think you've misplaced it.
But there comes a time where we all must take it up again, shrug its heavy, wet weight across our shoulders, feel it melding, shifting into muscle and sinew. It is our ticket back home into the chaotic ocean of life and the struggle and the great victory. It's who we are. It's who we will always be, henceforth and out.
So... I'm learning to grieve like a Selkie. And if you're struggling with loss like I am, lean into the knowledge that it is simply part of the coheelin druith, the sealskin, we all must wear. And that while time and the ocean may not heal completely, there is vindication in the memories and the feeling of longing and loss; for it means we loved and loved with all the constance of lighthouses and all the passion of tempests.
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