Last week, there was no Notes From a Dragonfly.
I knew there was supposed to be one. Saturday came, just like it does every week, and somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I hadn't written anything. But last weekend was my mother's burial service, and I simply couldn't concentrate enough to sit down and write a blog post. So I didn't.
Normally, that would bother me. I like keeping the promises I make to myself, even the little ones. If I decide I'm going to write something every week, work on a project by a certain date, or do something on a particular day, I want to follow through. There's a little part of me that looks at something unfinished and immediately starts reminding me that I was supposed to have done it already.
But life doesn't always care very much about what we wrote on the calendar.
Sometimes something big happens. Sometimes we're grieving. Sometimes work becomes overwhelming, someone we love needs us, we're exhausted, or our minds simply aren't cooperating. And sometimes nothing particularly dramatic happens at all—we just reach the end of what we have to give.
I think this happens with our spiritual lives, too. Maybe you meant to do something for the full moon and realized the next morning that you'd completely forgotten. Maybe there was a ritual you had planned for a particular day, but when that day arrived, you didn't have the energy for it. Maybe your cards have been sitting untouched for weeks, your journal hasn't been opened, or the little routine that once made you feel grounded somehow disappeared while you were busy dealing with everything else.
It can be surprisingly easy to turn those things into another reason to feel guilty. I was supposed to do that. I missed it. Now it's too late. But is it?
The moon is going to keep moving through its phases whether we perform a ritual or not. Our journals aren't going anywhere. The cards will still be there when we pick them up again. Whatever meaning those things hold for us doesn't disappear simply because life interrupted our plans.
The same is true outside of our spiritual lives. Sometimes a project takes longer than we thought it would. Sometimes the house isn't as clean as we'd like. Sometimes a deadline has to move, or the thing we promised ourselves we'd do every single week doesn't happen one week. Last week, this blog was that thing for me, and this week, I'm here again.
Maybe that's the part that matters more than keeping a perfect streak—not whether we managed to do everything exactly when we intended to, but whether we allow ourselves to return to the things that matter to us without turning the time we missed into a punishment.
There are things that really do have deadlines, of course. We can't tell the electric company that time is merely a human construct and expect them to be impressed. But even when something genuinely needs to be done, beating ourselves up because life got difficult doesn't magically give us back the time we lost.
Sometimes we have to adjust, ask for help, or accept that something isn't going to happen the way we pictured it. And sometimes we just have to begin again. I didn't write last week's Notes From a Dragonfly. I can't go backward and change that, and I don't think I need to make up for it by writing twice as much this week. I just needed to come back.
So if there's something you've missed lately—a deadline, a ritual, a habit, a project, or a promise you made to yourself—maybe you don't need to start by feeling guilty about the time that's already gone. Pick it up when you can. Light the candle tonight instead, open the journal to a fresh page, work on the project for twenty minutes, or start again on a completely ordinary Wednesday if that's when you're ready.
The calendar is useful. It helps us make plans and remember the things that matter, but it doesn't get to decide when we're allowed to come back to them.