Sun Chaser

Hello again!

I live in a land of little light. The sun comes out sometimes but it also stays dark and cloudy here.

A LOT.

In my family we have started to call it the ‘permacloud’. She usually rolls into town around December and rolls back out around March.

Sometimes I think it has contributed to a certain amount of comfortability I have around depression. It’s easy to be bummed out when you never see the sun.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the sun as metaphor.

My mentor always talks about how at our core - you know your core, the ‘you’ that is observing your life from the back booth, your soul… he says repeatedly that ‘you’, the true YOU at your core, you are the sun and the rest is just clouds. Our emotional responses, our physical responses, our thoughts, our concepts of ourselves…all clouds.

Pema Chödrön quote is coming to mind here, “You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather. Emotions, catastrophes, fights, tragedy and all the daily fluctuations of life are only temporary. What makes us an individual is separate from these things that seem to make up the consistency of life.”

For a really long time I thought I was the clouds. I identified with the gloom and made myself quite comfortable there. I had so many valid reasons to hide out there. I snuggled right under the cover of those clouds. They were made up of self-pity over past mistakes, regrets, losses, grief…and I just laid there. Sure I would throw on some makeup and pretend once in a while but inside my own body and mind the clouds were roiling away.

Theres a book I like to recommend called ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ that changed my outlook entirely. It’s a heavy read. Life can be that though right? So heavy. So dark….and the inner clouds rage. In the case of Viktor Frankl, the author and holocaust survivor it would be beyond reasonable given his inhumane level of suffering for this to be the case. He spends the first half of he book detailing his experience during the war and at the camps. So, you know, buckle up for that part. But the lasting impact of his life’s work as a direct result of his suffering gives hope to anyone who reads it.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”

Obviously the suffering he experienced is out of scale in comparison to your average persons experience of life - but we do all suffer and we do all have the ability to choose. There is choice involved in our response even though sometimes it may not feel that way. The ability to be responsible for our inner world if not our external circumstances is ours alone and it cannot be taken from us and that gives me hope.

It’s almost like the sun is always shining.