My very first studio was named Sunshine and Dandelions. After following the summer between England and South Africa for three years in a row, I woke one morning with a knowing that it was time to return to South Africa full time and put my dreams into motion. Currently, I am standing at a similar place in life.
Why Sunshine and Dandelions you might ask? Three summers brought long daylight hours and a lot of good times – mountain biking through France, traveling the English coastline in a van following the forecast to where ever the waves were and my first real experience of love and loss. I wanted to hold on to those memories. Dandelions might be a weed to most of you but their properties and symbolism are pure power. Remember the magic you felt was going to happen when you found a dandelion and blew it into the wind, closing your eyes and wishing big things? I was about to step into big things, I needed all the magic there possibly was.
Since then there were many times that I was asked to choose between creative freedom and the conventional mundane. For well over fifteen years I effortlessly chose myself and my career and sacrificed commitment and settling down. Maybe one day they can exist in the same room. I was adamant to follow my dreams and cut throat at times with love and relationships if it didn’t align or add to my path and the direction I was moving in. It felt like the fate of the free world rested on my decisions to bring my dreams into fruition, the fate of the free world is a big responsibility, one I take very seriously.
There has been some big changes happening around me and for me. As if the world I am surrounded with imitates the world within. A dear soul breathing his last breath and a self that no longer serves me finally saying good bye, she feels the home I have built is no longer hers. I am laying a lot to rest of late.
Change doesn’t keep office hours and seems to prefer rapid fire.
It has made me reflect on many things. How precious life is while we are alive. How important it is to do everything in our power to really embody this human experience. Push the limits. Love long and love hard. Speak what you feel, feel what you speak. Let your heart make a fool of you. Laugh at yourself. Get hurt. Make it right. Take responsibility. Hurt others, shoulder the pain, sit in uncomfortable conversations, know what it is to feel everything and nothing. Our weird and foreign relationship with death and loss. It scrambles our brains as well as our hearts and we’re never really sure how to deal with it or what to say. It’s wild to think that our lungs breathe air and then they don’t. To string sentences together, to hold a hand, to stare at a starry night sky, to laugh, to make love and then nothing. Everything that was, is no longer. To find a way through life from this place is hard.
At the same time I am right in the middle of my own swansong of sorts – a long hard fight with depression is coming to an end. It has stolen so much but gifted a lot too. I’m pulling my craziest dreams out from the depths of where they are buried and bringing them into the light, knowing I never want to let go again. Long hard years of doing the inner work is paying off. My cocoon period is over, it’s butterfly season yo! Yes, I know it’s winter but my growth has never kept office hours either. I blossom in winter and take stock in summer, I’ve always gone about life upside down, inside out and the wrong away around. This time though I know it’s not a weakness or a defect but a super power instead.
To be faced with the grief of one death and the celebration of another is a duality I didn’t ever think I would sit with. I’m trying to hold the grief for my friend and the celebration of new beginnings for myself in the same realm. A dandelion flower dies in order to free it’s seeds for the next flowers to bloom. It’s a mind-bendingly beautiful circle of life. And so comes to an end my own season of sunshine and dandelions.
There must be death for the new to bloom.
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