"You Better Start Cookin'"

A story on sadness, sacrifice, and feeding your hunger

Many days this season of life I could feel and see a shadow behind me.

Not one casted by the sun,

or ghastly one to be feared…

But one that clings to me like a dark weighted cloak.

Not unfamiliar either, but one I turn my gaze and heart from often.

Every meditation and deep journey there it was clinging on for dear life, so afraid to let go, so present with my every movement.

It was sadness.

Sadness, hugging my shoulders like a heavy backpack filled with textbooks I don’t need or want to read. 

I was called to let go of everything in this season of life.

To become empty so I can become filled.

Every collaboration, business, unaligned relationship, limiting belief, construct, and idea about myself, identity, even the way I show up to serve others as I got called into a more expanded expression of my purpose…it all had to go…

I let go and let go—not because it was easy or effortless, but because I had to.

I no longer wanted to carry the karmic web of my distant past…something bigger was calling me. 

It IS calling.

I claimed new desires, dreams, and visions presented to me. Some were old and forgotten but missed, some were soul memories and new destinies to claim as I rose higher into my truth and power. 

I just said yes.

I flung my heart open wide with a gasping yes, a hungry yes, an “I am willing to burn everything to the ground for this life, this love, this joy, this dream” kind of yes.

I said yes to coming home to myself, my soul, my light in new ways. Deeper ways. Truer ways.

I said yes to creating space…a deeply uncomfortable level of space and emptiness I have never granted myself as I addictively filled my life with distractions of other people’s needs, desires, wants, dreams, and life before my own because I didn’t believe I deserved anything that I truly desired or needed. 

The sadness I wore told me that.

Together we didn’t believe life was for us, just made by us.

Infinitely creative. Infinitely magical. 

Creation of this reality is easy. 

Knowing is easy.

Giving is easy.

Divining is easy. 

So I created, I gave, I knew things and shared them with people, I wore my best expression of divinity to way show others to theirs. 

But this season has been a season of remembering. 

Remembering what I am capable of, and what I love. Remembering my truth, and remembering why I am here. Redirecting my attention from those distractions and towards my own heart, the source of all my soul’s memory. 

What do I love? What do I want? What is my vision for me? What life am I creating? WHO’S life am I creating?

I ponder remembering all the lifetimes I have chosen to wear sadness behind a natural glow of love’s grace that hides it well over my innate joy as I sacrifice my freedom to give to others who need a re-tethering to home, a re-anchoring to The Mother who nourishes them. Soul’s who are hungry for that re-connection.

I love to feed people. 

If I feed enough people maybe love will come back to me. Maybe my love will find me. Maybe I can birth more for me. Maybe I can receive. Maybe I can let go. 

There is a parallel timeline me out there in another part of the world I journey to sometimes as she silently wallows in the weight of her sadness. Our sadness. A lesson my soul is casting out to claim in as many fragmented pieces as it needs to until we return home to the love we came from.

She creates too. Babies. Stories. An “idyllic” life and family. She sacrifices a lot too. Babies. Stories. A beautiful life of her truest, most wild design. She faces the ground and turns her head to the dark corners of her home and away from the expressions of joy and light she has casted. They don’t feed her. Sadness eats it all. 

A previous lifetime of an artist and visionary tells the same story of tirelessly creating light to feed the dark hole patriarchal war time has dug. Maybe joy from art will uplift the world just enough for him to rest. He leaves a legacy of magic for others, but here we are, the same soul essence sacrificing pleasure (and rest and nourishment) as the weight of the world feels heavier than my sadness ever will or can.

Collective sadness is a burden that untethers us from source, from The Mother of light that will feed, restore, replenish us all. 

Lifetime after lifetime I cycle the story:

Prolific creation.

Innate divine mother wisdom.

Profound artistry.

Attunement to the magic of the mystery.

Death by sacrifice.

Dis-ease by lack of self-contained joy and self-cultivated pleasure.

Turned off and unalived.

A mother, a sister, a father, an artist, a philosopher, a writer, a shaman, a healer…a soul journeying through this reality game to learn to create without sacrifice. To let go without fear. To leap to be held. To learn to be loved and receive. To master the containment of her essence and refinement of her magic. To birth a new lineage of creative expression and feminine power unbound by the illusionary limitations of the world. Of the mind. Of control. Of the past.

To choose destiny over fate. 

Sadness gets closer and closer, and heavier and heavier, the more I move away from my center of power.

But she also becomes more visible to me the more I let go and open my heart to witness her presence.

Light blue cloaked sadness with a grey face. She reminds me of a Remedios Varo painting, my favorite artist since I was a teenager. 

Try as I might she refuses to leave the more I push her away—clear, clear, clear—only clinging tighter. 

“You’re too heavy”

“You’re too sad”

“You’re too intense”

Words reflected to me, but already heard in my own head.

But eventually I surrender and keep letting go, because I know I have to, unraveling the seemingly infinitely tangled threads of sacrifice that separate me from pleasure. The threads of undeservingness that separate me from my joy. The threads of shame that turn me away from my love. 

I came here for alchemy, not denial of my truth. 

I let Sadness speak and move me to let go and let go and let go…

Until one day she turns into a sun.

I ask her what’s all this light under her darkened shroud and she tells me it’s love. My love. Our love. 

She calls me home to her warmth, reminding me that her shadow and light are from the same source, two sides of a heart’s expression: the sadness and joy that accompanies the living.

One from the pain of sacrifice, the sadness from lives never truly lived. 

One from the joy of pleasure that expands the field of light around my body and attunes me to miracles.

One side that no one likes to look at, but the other often gets taken or mistaken for and edible delight, drunk up by those separate from their own light as they carry the weight of fear on their backs, even heavier than my sadness. 

I ask Sadness, now beaming radiant golden love, how we protect her light. How do we keep her light on and bright and shining out to guide others home, without dimming or draining her powerful luminosity? 

She reminds me, simply and lightly, as if she has told me a thousand times before (she has), to feed myself. 

“Feed yourself and you will never go hungry.”

“Feed yourself and you’ll be so full you’ll simply and without effort have to generously donate your leftovers to those who need them.”

“But what if I am a starving woman with so much desire that needs to be fed? Like the hungriest, wildest, most ravenous Medusa-Melusine-Lilith of a woman-beast?” I ask…

She smiles and hands me a thread of light…“Well, you better start cookin’”

xo

Ash