The waterfall or Where the dark meets the light

Between light and darkness

She woke up early that morning. Unusually early, even for her standards. What was it? Has there been a strange noise that woke her? Has she had a bad dream? She couldn’t tell but she felt restless. Something inside her made her get up quickly, setting a coffee pot while already dressing even without a shower.

She’d been in this cabin for 3 weeks already in an attempt to connect with herself. She had been feeling lost lately. More lost than usual. She grabbed her freshly brewed filter coffee and poured it into her thermos mug and left the cabin. It’s been dawning on a new day when she walked through the forest through the mystical scenery where the end of the night meets the beginning of the day. “It’s the short but beautiful moment where the darkness meets the light, where they both have a true moment to encounter yet can never seem to exist at the same time at the same place.”, she thought while feeling an unpleasant weight on her chest.

She arrived at a waterfall. Small but mesmerizing and completely unexpected. She couldn’t take her eyes off the water streaming down. Streaming downwards with such a brutal force, yet natural elegance.  It also reminded her of a  flood of tears. The sort of tears when you feel like you lost the ground beneath your feet and you’re left in utter despair “It’s nature in its true shape.”, she thought. “It can brutally grab you, force you down until you almost can’t breathe anymore but it can also gently take you along and push you in the right direction on the path you were always meant to be, depending on where you stand and how you happen to cross path with it.”

She decided to give in and sit down after a while as if she felt the enormous strength of the image she watched overpowering her. It felt forced but still in a natural way so she knew it was  right.

Eventually she could feel the connection with the soil beneath her, like the Earth was giving stability, offering to hold her while the water kept streaming downwards with unchanged speed and unforgiving strength. It no longer felt like she was  just watching this wonder of nature, she was right in the center of the waterfall while still being held by the ground underneath.

It was that moment when she understood why she had been led here and also that she would be able to leave the cabin now.

It’s been fundamental acceptance she had been desperately searching for. Accepting life in its brutal reality, it its mesmerizing beauty, it its unpredictability and its stunning simplicity. But most of all she had accepted herself as part of all the above, undeniably connected with no way to escape. Being strong and being weak, feeling powerful and helpless, being brutal and kind, being terribly ugly and stunningly beautiful, crumbling while weeping and being exceptionally courageous, being absorbed by the darkness or shining her brightest light. Not being exclusively good nor bad. Being everything and everyone and nothing at all. Being alive.

She got up from the ground and walked back to the cabin. “This is acceptance. This is me. This is Life. “, she thought while she packed her bag ready for the day to unfold.

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