Dark Forest

  This one's for the ones walking through the dark forest right now. 🌑

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There are moments in life when something is taken from us.

Sometimes it is taken by another.
Sometimes by circumstance.
And sometimes, without even realizing it, we abandon a part of ourselves simply to survive.

And perhaps this is one of the deepest wounds we carry:

the moment we stop reaching for what we truly desire,

stop touching what is true,

stop creating from our own instinct,

stop protecting what is sacred within us.

But I walked.

I left.

I entered the unknown.

And slowly, through the journey, something began to return.

The dark forest that once felt scary, even horrifying,
became sacred.

This is what transformation asks of us.

Not to become who we were before the wound,
but to grow new capacities from the very place where we were broken.

Sometimes healing is not restoration.

It is initiation.

The forest became a place where I met myself beyond the identity I had known,
beyond the version of myself that had been shaped by what I had lost.

I learned how to walk in the dark.

How to dance in the dark.

I learned to receive.
I learned to trust.

I learned that my worth was never in what I could produce,
hold,
give,
or perform.

And slowly, what was lost began to regenerate.

This is the medicine of the dark forest.

There are parts of us that life may strip away,
but there are parts that cannot be destroyed.

Our instinct.
Our inner knowing.
Our capacity to love.
Our wildness.
Our soul.

And sometimes we have to enter the darkness
to remember them.

We begin to ask ourselves:

Where have I stopped reaching?

Where have I given away my power in exchange for belonging, safety, approval, or love?

Where am I still waiting for someone else to give me back
what I abandoned in myself?

And perhaps most importantly:

What wants to grow back through me now?

What wants to be created through me,
not from the place of proving,
but from the place of truth?

What wants to be felt,
received,
expressed,
protected,
and brought into the world?

Maybe the journey is not about becoming untouched by life.

Maybe it is about becoming so deeply rooted in ourselves
that even after everything is taken away,

we discover

we were never truly empty.

Something in us was always alive.

Something in us was always listening.

Something in us was always waiting for the darkness
to become fertile ground.

Waiting to grow again.

And perhaps this is the deepest transformation:

not returning to who we were,

but becoming someone
we could only have become
because we walked through the forest.