The End is the Beginning
There is a moment… just before the final chord fades, before the door fully closes… when the air goes still. Something ancient exhales, and the body knows — this isn’t an ending… but a curl of a loop, the inhale before rebirth.
In myth, this moment lives everywhere: Persephone eats the seed. Inanna kneels naked before Ereshkigal. Psyche opens the box. The threshold isn’t a border; it’s a wound-portal, a hinge where time folds in on itself.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes of this terrain in Women Who Run With the Wolves as sacred compost:
“to die and be reborn… again and again.”
This is how women change — through rupture and return.
Endings carry eros. Not the climax kind, but the ache of what once pulsed, now gone still. This ache is holy. We feel it after a birth splits us open, after a friendship dissolves in silence, when a poem stops coming. In an age of synthetic closure dressed as AI-written goodbyes, prepackaged grief, algorithmic “moving on”, there is something revolutionary about lingering. To not resolve, to not rebrand, and just stand there letting the smoke rise.
You see it in the muted grids of Agnes Martin, paintings that whisper of order but reveal emptiness. You hear it in the heart-stretching silences of Arvo Pärt’s work. You feel it in the earth-bodies of Ana Mendieta, the traces of presence, disappearance, and return. And you see it, too, in the unfinished archives of artists like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose final works still speak, even though they were ruptured by violence. Interruption can also be sacred.
We live in a culture that fears the pause. We replace endings with updates and turn grief into content. In the Blood of Aurora current, we do not rush forward. We bow to the taste of what’s ending. We quietly trace this sensation in our blood, in our dreams. We let the spiral guide us back.
Enter the Boa-Current.
Journal Prompts
What part of you has recently ended—even if no one noticed?
Where in your body do you carry the ache of something gone?
Can you name a threshold in your life that felt like both a death and a return?
What would it mean to eroticize the pause before a new beginning?
Stand in front of a mirror and speak aloud the name of a closed chapter. Watch your mouth form the ending.
Sit with your technology turned off for five minutes. What emotions rise without input?
Write a letter to the part of you that went quiet. Let her speak—not in full sentences, but in sounds, images, tastes.
Editor’s Note
Thank you for returning to Blood of Aurora after a long, quiet season.
If you’ve been subscribed here for a while, you’re now receiving this work in a new form, on a new platform; Substack. These essays are part of a reawakened current, where we explore thresholds, eros, creativity, grief, and feminine remembrance together. Checkout more through the About page.
I’m so grateful you’ve stayed. And I’m so honored to step back into your inbox… not with noise, but with something real, slow, and alive.
With Love,
Dóri
Agnes Martin, “Leaf,” 1965, acrylic and graphite on canvas. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Museum purchase, Sid W. Richardson Foundation, Endowment Fund.
Imágen de Yágul (Silueta Series) by Ana Mendieta, 1973, via San Francisco MoMA
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