By Dana Stovern
October 14, 2021
Paonia, Colorado
Sometimes, a cricket is a little messenger with something big to say about the tilt of life.
Everything about selling a house to break up a partnership and move is counterintuitive. To sell a house, you must clean what was once your home, like madly shining your shoes, burnishing all the corners you never bothered with before. Then, just as people show up, you must drive away; drive away like a strange Monty Python movie. Surreal.
To break up a partnership, you must stop with the tide of habits that stitched things together, even when the relationship was empty and dead, and instead signify that the end is here. Heartbreaking.
To move is to put your life in boxes and label them, as if your life is that label written on dry brown cardboard. Then, you put those boxes away, time-capsuling them to deal with in some other time and place, wherever and whenever that is. Disorienting.
All of this means that a cricket singing from a small, bushy geranium with pink petals filtering everywhere, all over the deranged carpet, the plant littering its musky smells from a clay pot — all of it momentarily saved from the snow — is the singular orchestra reminding you that life is lived through cycles, and that’s all this is. The swirl of showings, the unraveling habits, the growing stack of boxes are part of the cycle of something dying.
And it’s this singular cricket singing its heart, or legs, out that echoes the past chorus of crickets xylophoning their legs into some transcendental phrase from the heat of the grasses that lifted you through the summer that is gone now. This is not that. This is the death cycle clearing the way for some future spring, some future summer, where a new world unfurls. But now, ’tis late autumn with one lone cricket singing courageously in the living room, and the burnishing of the sun fades into the darkness of the longest night coming soon with Dia de los Muertos and the Winter Solstice.
Now the cricket is a reminder to burn bright with inner light through the low tide to the other side.
Dana Stovern is founder and coach of The Magic of Somatic Money, and author of the blog Along the Learning Curve of Life. Even though her profession is body-based money relationship coaching, her first love is words, writing and exploring the depths of the human conscious (or unconscious) condition in body and soul development.