Have you ever forgotten yourself?

I have.

When I could no longer see myself looking back from the glass, I began to engineer my own rescue.

In 02008, I opened my skull to gain a closer view of the contents. A scant centimeter of lifted hinge and the entire lid flipped off, dragonflies whirling everywhere. Their sound is simultaneously beautiful and terrifying.

I followed my winged messengers of the gods. They led me where I needed to go, showed me what I needed to see, told me, at long last, what I needed to hear that I might understand myself.

This year I made peace with family ghosts. I will carry a sadness with me always for what could have been, what we might have become together. They've earned a place in my mind in return for leaving my heart alone. I've given them the moors to haunt, the wilderness to hurtle through in their own grief. There's nothing more I can do for them, and nothing more they know how to do for me. The wilds are their home, civilization is mine.

This year I learned well the lesson risking all is often a better strategy than attempting to contain what is slowly fraying into constituent strands, the patterned weave gone back to the place it came from. Risking all forces the best parts of the pattern together: the strongest angles become knots; the beautiful design is made perfectly, pristinely clear; the straight line forced into an edge falls away to expose the shape's true intention. It may not be obvious during the process. It may look as if the end of everything is at hand. With a deep breath the mind shifts, the eye trains: a masterpiece makes itself known.

Have you ever remembered yourself? Have you ever stepped with purpose, knowing the placement of each foot was a magickal act, each fluid shifting of weight a flex of great import in the controlled fall we call walking? Every glance creating a world, the resonant echos of each booted footfall reinforcing themselves into entire universes?

Have you ever woke in one deep hour to find the light of a full moon shining through tall loft windows, its filigreed patterns in black and silver tracing out a design of your boundless future, their vein-work a route map between what lives within and what waits to be given shape without?

I have.

In 02008 I finally parted the shadows in my mind. Long depression lifted. Despair burned away. I found that wayward full moon and placed it in my own sky.

It's amazing how far one can see with just a small amount of moonlight.