Aux Anges

Recently my mother received an email from a friend who used the French term aux anges (meaning: “blissfully happy” or “over the moon”) to refer to the many upcoming births among their friends’ collective families. The coincidence that these births will all happen in mid to late March seemed all that more significant as March 20, 2015—a mere 31 weeks away—marks the first day of Spring. It is quite literally a time of rebirth…when the cold frost melts away and the world becomes lush, open, and alive once again. It is a time when we feel elated by possibilities and mesmerized by the newness of things. As Robert Frost explains in A Prayer in Spring: “for this is love and nothing else is love.”

The difficulty, however, is the fact that aux anges is not (nor could it ever be) a permanent feeling. It may pass through us for a moment or maybe, if we’re lucky, even a season. At times it’s the most unattainable feeling in the world. And as of late, it has felt more distant than I would like.

As if my body and spirit knew how very far away I’ve been from feeling joy, life’s recent events compelled me to finally let go and give in to whatever the opposite of aux anges is: that dark, heavy feeling that so many of us know. Fueled by anxiety, despair, fear, sadness. We feel suffocated and suppressed. These feelings came surging back with the force of an earthquake, as they did for me six months ago, bringing me to a place I hadn’t remember existed.

We tend to not want to talk about this dark place because of how scary it feels. But it’s important to remind each other that we’re not alone. It’s important to remind each other that the relief comes eventually—whether it takes 12 hours, 24 hours, or longer. Relief comes when we realize how our darkness requires us to examine things in our lives differently. Our breakdowns beckon us to discover what we’ve been hiding or lying to ourselves about and scoop out those broken pieces of our Soul. We release that which stifles us in order to feel lighter and new…open to the possibility that we are truly alive and are being guided the entire way.