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This week, our card is Daybreak from Pleasure Alchemy. What sun is rising this week? Where must the darkness be lightened and lifted? Have you forgotten that every single day the sun returns? Trust in this. Trust that the sun will rise. A new day will come tomorrow. Will you be ready to greet it? Will you, too, remember to start anew?
I’ve been living in my Philmont apartment for about eight months now. That means that I’ve learned the quality of light in three seasons. The changing angle and placement of the rising sun has almost imperceptibly inched across my kitchen and living room windows every morning.
Now in the beginning of March, the sun crests the hill across the street and graces my face as I sit down to eat my cereal. This brilliant shafting light lasts about 15 minutes or so from about 7:55-8:10, just until the sun moves sideways and is blocked by the abandoned house opposite. But it’s enough. This sun reminds me that light always comes. It always returns. Even when we, ourselves, feel dark.
Daybreak is the first Soul remedy in Pleasure Alchemy. As I explained in last week’s post, the Soul remedies are all about those transcendent experiences that I believe we can all take pleasure in. And being the first Soul remedy, Daybreak also belongs to the 1st Stage of Pleasure which is all about gentleness, curiosity, and nonjudgment. I know, I know, that’s a lot of information! But hopefully it can give some context and some ideas for exploration.
For example, how is daybreak gentle? How might it inspire curiosity? And how is every new day without judgment?
I find the word itself fascinating. Daybreak. What, exactly, is being broken? In the guidebook I wrote, “is it that the light breaks the darkness? Do the birds break the silence? Perhaps it is daybreak because you suddenly find that the fears of yesterday break and dissolve around you with the advent of light.” I like this idea, this reminder. What would it mean if every morning we could imagine that the sun was coming to break something that needed breaking?
The word break is typically—at least in my understanding—negative. When we break things they’re broken and broken isn’t good, is it? But maybe that’s just another linguistic trap, another narrow pathway I’ve wandered into unknowingly, like believing that soft was the opposite of strong. Maybe breaking things is a good idea, especially when those things narrow our world and make us feel narrow and small, as well.
So what needs to be broken? What can we dissolve with light? Either real light or metaphorical light?
Perhaps it is time to break the chains that bind us and make us feel shame or guilt. Perhaps it is time to break out of the boxes that confine us and keep us tied to unsatisfying identities or ideas for what we should or shouldn’t be or do. For such releases to occur we need light. We need to be able to see. And how much have we not seen because the light was blocked from reaching us at all?
I could have titled this card Dawn. I could have titled it Sunrise. But I didn’t. Because sometimes things need breaking. Sometimes we need breaking. What would it mean to be broken open? To be able to release all the love and light and warmth and joy and pleasure we’ve kept trapped inside ourselves?
I’m not saying I have any answers (I don’t, I rarely do). But often asking questions can allow us to see things in new ways. Often asking a question lets in new light. And, if nothing else, maybe this card can serve as inspiration to set a reminder on your phone to get up and watch the sun rise tomorrow.
Questions for this week:
What is one thing I really, really want to break this week?1
What silence needs to be broken?
Where in my life have I forgotten to let in the light?
What does it mean to be new? What does a truly new day feel like?
Birds sing to greet the dawn. What song could I sing for a new day?2
Even if it isn’t safe or realistic to break some specific thing, there’s still the delicious world of the imagination! Go to town with that mental sledgehammer.
Personally, I’m thinking of Morning Has Broken by Cat Stevens.