bloodteethandflame

I know that I am rather behind on Cauldrons and Cupcakes’ Weekly Journal project.

I believe that we are in Week 4, but my depression and social anxiety has been hitting me hard in the past few weeks, and I will definitely admit that I’ve been struggling more than usual with my daily routines.  Therefore, I’m not posting as much.

As well, as much as I’d intended to post my weekly process in this project, I haven’t been… but I have been doing the meditations and journaling.

It’s been helpful.

This past Sunday, I listened to the meditation for Week 2, and I received

The color: Magenta

The words/phrase: You can’t go back- only forward.  Do not be afraid.

…and I drew the oracle card, The Hare.

~~~

Magenta: Passion.  Creativity.  Confidence. Sexuality.

I do think about the past- how I used to allow myself to feel so readily, and how it is not so easy now because of how I feel about my body.

When I think of the color magenta, I especially think of passion and body confidence.

During the meditation, I also felt nudged to associate this color with the intersection between sexuality and spirituality.

It is a warm, passionate color that has playfulness about it that especially reminds me of when my sexuality was uncomplicated and fun and I had the confidence to move and enjoy and I felt better about my body.

I wonder how to get back to that sense of passion and body confidence.

With this in mind, I am trying to re-discover it by taking better care of my body.  I am trying to do less comfort-eating and engage in more exercise and physical activities.

Such as this morning, it felt good to weed my front garden.  I’d felt guilty as weeding always makes me feel as if the land-wights are upset that I am tearing out all the plant life in my gardens almost to the point of barrenness.  (Barren because I’ve yet to replace the hedges that I removed last summer with any flowers, and so nothing but weeds has been growing in those narrow dirt patches where the hedges used to be.)

For this reason, I am often overwhelmed (or likewise reluctant) to begin weeding — but once I do begin, I reach a good rhythm in my work.  Soon enough, I’ve worked up a good sweat in the Florida sun, but I do not notice the intensity of my efforts until I’ve begun to see droplets falling into the soft, dark soil.  I am perspiring freely into the dirt.  Perhaps this is my offering – the sweat of my work as I clear away the weeds, deadfall, and other withered debris around my single rose bush and heather.   The heather is rather large now and I have had to cut it back several times due to its growth.  I feed both the rose-bush and the heather regularly enough that it’s quite possible if I left those two plants alone, they might take over the rest of the garden…if the weeds’ root-systems didn’t often choke them out.

Perhaps the front garden could be a metaphor for my life right now: The beauty of my garden is only found in one neat little corner while the rest is either choked with weeds or barren of growth.

But if joy (ie, the flowers) were allowed to flourish, that joy just might overtake everything.

Magenta is the color of passionate growth,as the blooms of the rose-bush are light pink edged in varying shades of dark pink, or magenta.