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And if you are grieving the life you thought you would have, Baba Yaga would soften for a moment and tell you:

"Mourn it. Cry for it. Build a little fire and let the tears fall. But do not build your house beside that fire."

The past is a place to visit.

Not a place to live.

So if you feel lost today, ask yourself:

What am I pretending not to know?

What truth have I been avoiding?

What small step would make tomorrow easier than today?

What would I do if I trusted myself?

Then do that thing.

Not the whole journey.

Just the next thing.

And as the old witch disappears into the trees, her final words drift back through the darkness:

"You are not lost, child. You are between chapters. Stop trying to read the ending and start writing the next page."

- The Hag

And if you are grieving the life you thought you would have, Baba Yaga would soften for a moment and tell you: "Mourn it. Cry for it. Build

“Dreams are not only language of the soul; they are events in the life of the soul.

Dreaming is not only the most common altered state of consciousness; it can take you to alternate realities, to dream worlds that are no less real than the physical world and may be more real.

While dreaming provides access to other worlds, it also offers gifts and resources that can help you do better in everyday life. Dreaming can even help to turn back the Dark Times.

Dreaming is not only what happens during sleep. “Sargon lay down not to sleep but to dream”, we read on an ancient cuneiform tablet abut a dream that changed a dynasty. Many of the most important recorded dreams in history – an in contemporary life – unfold in a half-dream state, called hypnagogia by sleep experts and “the place between sleep and awake” by Tinker Bell.

Dreams are social in a number of senses. You get out and about; you make visits and receive visitations, from other humans, dead or alive, and persons-other-than-human. To understand what is going on in a dream, you may need to ask Who, What, Where, When, Why. What you discover in the dream may affect the welfare of those around you. You may dream a warning for a friend or relative, or a whole village, even a nation.

It’s all about soul. Dreams are the language of the soul and they show us what the soul wants, as opposed to the agendas of the ego or the expectations of other people. More than this, dreams are experiences of soul, events in the life of a self that is never truly confined to the body. This has been the understanding of most human cultures across most of history.”

- Robert Moss

- Drawing: “Moon at the Foot of My Bed” by Robert Moss

"A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets."

~ Gloria Stuart

The Fortune Teller by Caravaggio. c.1595

[detail]

The Magic Ring All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king. ~ From The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein. The Riddle of Strider, a poem contained in a letter from Gandalf which the innkeeper gives to Frodo, The Fellowship of the Ring Book 1, Chapter 'Strider'.

Artwork (c) by Raine @ Inner Voice Art

“Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.”

― Frida Kahlo

A door lock created in 1911 by the German locksmith Frank L. Koralewsky (1872-1941). It is made of iron, gold, silver and copper, and depicts the fairy tale "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs".

Frank L. Koralewsky served as a traditional ironworker’s apprentice in his native north-German town of Stralsund. After obtaining journeyman status, he worked in various German shops before immigrating to Boston in the mid- 1890s. By 1906 he was a member of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, specializing in locksmithing and hardware.

This extremely intricate lock, which took seven years to complete, exemplifies the early 20th Century taste for sentimental medievalism and represents the pinnacle of the metalworking tradition at the turn of the 20th Century.

Exhibited at 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, where it won a gold medal, the lock illustrates Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s fairy tale “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

At times, we are asked to bear witness to a shattering. To the death of an old dream - me and my life and the way it was all supposed to turn out.

In mourning what has fallen away, a previously hidden threshold begins to appear.

Grief is not something we "make it through" and emerge from unchanged. We don't finish it, but stand in awe as it takes us apart and pieces us back together.

It is a faithful companion of the unknown, moving not by way of the straight line, but by circle and spiral.

It holds us through the darkness as well as the light, until another life begins to gather itself.

- Matt Licata

Detail from a painting by Belgian artist Gustave Léonard de Jonghe called 'In the artist's studio'

"When you focus with soul eyes, you will see home in many, many places."

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Image: Coming Home ~ Mohem Veda

Woman Adorned by Walter Hugo (Millie Brown)

Love Sorrow

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must take care of what has been given. Brush her hair, help her into her little coat, hold her hand, especially when crossing a street. For, think, what if you should lose her? Then you would be sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness would be yours. Take care, touch her forehead that she feel herself not so utterly alone. And smile, that she does not altogether forget the world before the lesson. Have patience in abundance. And do not ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment by herself, which is to say, possibly, again, abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult, sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child. And amazing things can happen. And you may see, as the two of you go walking together in the morning light, how little by little she relaxes; she looks about her; she begins to grow.” ~ Mary Oliver, Red Bird Photo: Echo NittoLitto by Claudia Susana

On a hot summers day on top of the Big Biba Roofgardens, the Derry & Tom's building.....The way it was....Circa 1973

The unlived life does not always ask to be recovered. Sometimes it asks to be mourned.

There are ways we imagined our lives might unfold that never came to pass. Dreams that remained unopened. Forms of tenderness that were never welcomed. Capacities that stayed hidden because the conditions for their flowering were never there. Ways of speaking, creating, trusting, resting, loving, or belonging that could not fully emerge in the world we were given.

We often imagine healing as a return—as the recovery of what was lost, the reclaiming of what had to go underground. And sometimes it is. Sometimes something long exiled does begin to find its way home.

But not always.

Sometimes healing begins not with retrieval, but with grief. With allowing ourselves to feel the sorrow of what could not happen, what was interrupted, what had to be left behind in order to survive, remain connected, or make it through.

This grief is not a failure of healing. It is not resignation, and it is not collapse. It is a form of love. Because what is mourned is no longer abandoned. What is grieved is no longer left wandering at the edge of the psyche, carrying its loneliness in silence. It is brought into the heart and given a place among the things that mattered.

Perhaps this is one of grief’s quiet mercies: not that it restores the unlived life, but that it refuses to exile it any longer. It allows us to turn toward what mattered, even if it can no longer unfold in the way we once hoped. And in that turning, something sacred happens. The lost life is no longer asked to disappear without witness. It is met, blessed, and carried differently.

Perhaps grief is one of the ways love keeps faith with what could not be lived.

- Matt Licata