28/09/2025
There’s something very powerful about the way we move and orient our bodies. It becomes part of the story we tell even if we aren’t aware of it. When I stand in my lounge room and face my body eastward, I’m making a conscious choice to orient towards hope, towards the promise of new life and the dawning of new understanding and new levels of awareness. It’s the art and power of living symbolism.
When my world felt as though it was falling apart, when it felt like I was falling apart, I spent a great deal of time oriented towards my grief. It was all I could feel, all I could see. For weeks I lived constantly with ‘eyes set weary on the sinking sun.’ Consumed by everything I’d lost, spiralling around how and why it was lost, wrestling with the desire to get it all back and the deeper, truer desire to let it go.
This was necessary.
This was the point.
I knew as surely as anything that if I resisted my grief or tried to control it and contain it, I would miss this opportunity and the treasures of growth and self-knowledge that it offered me. But it was the daily orientation of my body towards the eastern horizon, the consistent repetitive practice of facing the sunrise and the promise of tomorrow, that reminded me that even as I walked through the lengthening shadows into the dark of night, dawn was always coming. I could soften towards the pain, surrender to the process, knowing I would emerge again into daylight, no matter how long the night.
And so I stood facing East, and found the courage to follow the dying sun into the Underworld.
(You can read the whole thing at the link in my bio)
