Endings

Posted by Jennifer Baylor at The Writing Cocoon.  
Filed under "The Mental Game"

The End comes for us all - ask the ancient Greeks.

I met with my therapist earlier this week. We were talking about feeling anxiety, and she mentioned that their was a general sense of unease in the world, and for some this was especially magnified as we approached the end of the Mayan calendar. What? I had no idea.

That should tell you the size of the rock I've been living under. I mean, I knew about the end of the Mayan calendar, vaguely recalled that somewhere I'd heard it mentioned some time ago and that there were some doomsday predictions around it, but I had no idea how much some people were seriously freaked out about it. When I got home after my appointment, I looked around on the Internet and found out that there is a more than a little hysteria around today's date. Apparently, as I write this, we have about 2 hours until the world ends.

Here I've been making plans for the New Year, trudging unknowingly through my daily life, with no notion that it was all for naught. Sounds about right, for me. I do tend to get trapped inside my head for long periods of time, then stumble out into the light, momentarily blind and ignorant to the world around me.

Which brings me to the title of the post: Endings. And, no, I'm not writing about story endings or novel endings. When you've had a rough go, and let's face it we all have crappy weeks, months or even years, how do you put an line under the bad period and move forward toward something new? That's what I've been thinking about these last few weeks.

I used to hate thinking about endings: the finality, the change of what was, and the uncertainty of something new beginning. After this year, I have a completely different perspective. I mean, besides it being a bit useless and all, to resist endings, I've actually been craving an ending for the last five months. It isn't that I think that a new year will begin and nothing bad will ever happen again, but it feels like it is time to transition out of this dark period I've been living through and move back to the land of the living (where people are freaking the frack out about Mayan calendars - seriously, how did I miss all this?).

So, a group of yogis on-line have been meditating with specific intentions in the days leading up to the winter solstice. This gave me an idea - I needed a ceremony. I like the ideas and imagery around the winter solstice, and what date could be more perfect for a little makeshift ceremony? It marks the time when the part of the world we live in returns to light. It is a shift in energy, a slow reawakening begun, a return to life - maybe it sounds a bit hokey to some of you, but our ancestors all over the globe have appreciated and marked the solstices going back a very long time. And, as a writer, symbols appeal to me - I appreciate their power.

The solstice will occur at 11:11am GMT, so I have a little more than an hour to prepare. It is a really simple little "ceremony" I've prepared. I've been meditating on these recent hardships, both my own and some of the more global, and thinking about how to accept what is, while letting go at the same time (not easy - I like control!).  Now, I'm going to write down the grief, anger, disappointments and fears I've experienced this past year - all the things I've been thinking on this past week and a half - then simply burn the list just as the Earth's tilt is at its farthest from the Sun. It isn't magic. Nothing will be resolved or materially different. I just needed to find a way to mark what has happened and provide a place/space to jump off from in order to let go and get on with life. And get on with writing, there's going to be loads of writing!