"Swan is the master of traveling through the awkward phases of life. She is good at being bad at things. She is at peace with floundering and forgives herself of how embarrassing the learning process is. When she does this she becomes simply stunning."
Physical beauty will always yield to age. Youth is a gift we often feel as it leaves us. But this departure need not be sad or painful. In the contrast of aging and losing agility we experience more fully just how wonderful being young really was. As we surrender to the loss of physical grace, we have the opportunity to gain the power of poise. Aging is not about loss. It is about more effective energy management and sifting through the distractions that are not worth our efforts to hone in on an effective state of living.
Most indigenous cultures honor age as the greatest achievement. Swan Medicine knows that youth is not where the true beauty lies. Youth is the jungle gym we use to locate our true, eternal beauty. All things fade. But you are no thing. You are an energy stream of pure Grace on an adventure through time and space. Whenever you feel you’ve located some aspect of your identity, Swan asks that you remember the sacred, “I am not that.”
You are not the violence that was committed against you. You are not any gender, or race, or age. You are that which experiences all those things. You are Eternal Spirit of Love.
Another aspect of Swan Medicine is about finding where we belong. In the famous story the Ugly Duckling, we learn how one baby swan discovers who she really is and how to shift reality to empower her gifts and skills. The ugly duckling did not learn that she did not belong on Earth. She only learned she did not belong with the ducks! Where are your people? If you are having trouble finding them, it may be you are still in the process of becoming who you really are. Shed the downy feathers of childhood identity. Conduct a ceremony for shifting into adulthood.
The state of childhood is the only time unconditional love is available to us. When we grow old enough to feed and cloth ourselves and learn on our own, our love relationships cease to be unconditional, as much as we like to believe otherwise. All adult relationships are conditional, optional, and able to be renegotiated at any time. This means that no one owes you anything once you are an adult. As a child you were most certainly owed love and protection. If you did not get it but you lived through that deprivation, Swan Medicine asks you to release the seeking for what can now never be. If you are alive, you got what you needed. Adult relationships are a collaboration of mutual effort. If one works harder than the other, resentments will soon follow. But if communication can be established then the ebb and flow of exchanging energy can thrive.
Many people want to believe that taking love vows as adults means their partner just has to put up with negligent behavior. You don’t. They don’t. Parents are the only ones who can provide unconditional love and if they were not able to do that, Swan says, leave that longing. Glide away to another place in the lake. Make peace with what never was in your past and love what you have bloomed into. If your parents could give you what you long for, they would have done so by now. Stop seeking from a source that can not provide. Give that love and attention to yourself. What you ask of others is really what you are needing to learn how to do for yourself.
If Swan Medicine has glided into your life, it is time to surrender to the awkward, the frustrating, and the seemingly wrong. Nothing has happened that is too great for Grace to hold. Reality arises from what you are capable of expecting. Your expectations are often determined by what you have experienced in life. If you have repeatedly experienced being let down by people then it is probably only a matter of time before that next new person lets you down. By identifying your honest expectations about a person or a situation you are then able to turn those expectations around. Not all at once. It often begins with identifying a condition you don’t want and then reaching with your minds imagination what you do want. This reaching is called hope.
Whether or not your imagined vision arrives has no bearing on your ability to sustain feeling hope over feelings of disappointed. Practice hope, not so that you will gain the physical reality you seek, but so that you can live in the grace of how hope feels. It takes the same amount of energy to be positive as it does to be negative. How you experience life, what you reach for is your choice. "
Entry by White Cloud Woman of the Four Winds