 This morning, on the equinox, I woke from a dream about my old engagement ring. Which was actually my wedding ring—Josh proposed ringlessly, so he finally bought a diamond ring on our drive up the coast in search of a seaside elopement spot, and the next day he put it on my finger when we made our vows before the justice of the peace. I stood on the beach rocks in my silver heels, reminding myself in a panic, divorce is not the worst thing in the world. Too codependent to tell him I didn’t want to marry him, too afraid of being unloved and abandoned to let him go. Our marriage lasted two years. Diamonds are forever though, right? Mine was a lab-made blue diamond, flanked with two white diamonds, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I left it in the US for safekeeping when I embarked two years later on the African adventure from which I never returned, and I missed its thrilling sparkle on my finger. Years after I’d divorced and settled in Kenya and adopted my daughter, I put it on my right hand during a US visit and kept it there, simply to enjoy its beauty. Then one day, behind on my bills, I sold it, to a slimy jewelry dealer on the opposite end of Nairobi who paid me a fraction of its worth. Seven hundred bucks he gave me for that treasure. I used it to catch up on rent. Last night in my dream, though, a friend had stored the ring for me in her jewelry box, and when I went to retrieve it, it was gone—she had absentmindedly loaned it to someone else. I panicked. I made a scene. The police got involved. Then at some point, as I was crawling toward wakefulness, came that magical moment of dream meeting reality when I remembered: wait a second, I sold that ring years ago to pay my rent, there’s nothing to make such a fuss about--I’m the one who let it go. “There’s nothing to make such a fuss about”—words that have been used far too often, by myself as much as others, to indict my emotions (which are admittedly dysregulated at times). Yet in the dream, I said them to myself as comfort. I had not been betrayed by my friend; in real life, it was my choice to part with that precious thing. That was a beautiful equinox dream-message for me. As a person who skews heavily toward victim thinking, I feel empowered when I acknowledge my choices and take ownership of them. It’s not the circumstances themselves that matter so much as the way I feel inside them, and feeling empowered rather than victimized is the foundation for moving forward, finding new solutions, and being at peace. As the equinox tips me from summer into fall, I’m ready to tap into some deeper empowerment, let go of regret, and harvest the positive outcomes of my choices. Ready to honor my agency.
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 Recently, I met a girl whom I found arresting. I’ll call her Estelle. Late 20s, maybe early 30s—tall, lovely figure, beautiful hair, beautiful face; just a truly gorgeous girl. Outgoing. Vivacious. Bright. The type of girl you look at and think, she might be in a small town now, but she is going places.
Estelle was with her boyfriend, who in comparison was stunningly bland. Doubtless he’s a perfectly nice boy, but let’s just say he’s a Ford Fiesta, and this girl is a Porsche all the way. And I wanted to tell her. I wanted to take her hands and say, Estelle, honey, you are playing so small. Waiting tables at a tiny diner in a tiny town, weighing yourself down with this bozo, are you kidding me? You have the X factor, child. You have a brightness, an energetic resonance, about you. It’s time to see yourself the way the rest of the world sees you; it’s time to get out there and shine. Of course my reaction to poor Estelle (who’s just minding her own business and living her own life and is probably quite happy with Fiestaboy) isn’t really about her, it’s about me. Only recently has it clicked with me that in some ways I’m still walking through the world trailing this cloud of unbelongingness that doesn’t reflect how others see me, only how I see myself—the me from my little-girl-hood, each day leaving the religious compound and venturing into the big bad world of the local elementary school. In my culottes. My yard sale clothes. My long hair captured in two braids. It was the 80s; other girls had short perms, and shoulder pads, and stonewash jeans. And me, the backward religious, so socially disastrous as to be—ironically—unredeemable. I haven’t been aware of myself still carrying this around. It hasn’t haunted me. But recently, it came back to me after I traveled to Washington DC to attend a conference and do some advocacy on Capitol Hill. I was shocked to discover how comfortable and capable I felt—I was dressed appropriately; I spoke articulately; I have a story to tell, and a conviction that damn right the power-brokers of our capitol ought to listen as I tell it. I flew home with this stunned realization, that I could be playing a much bigger game—that I have kept myself small, hidden, and why? Because I am still relating to myself as that little girl in culottes, hopelessly dorky, a perpetual misfit, shrinking from the expectation of belittlement everywhere I turn. It makes me think of Marianne Williamson’s famous reading—“we are all meant to shine, as children do.” Even children in culottes and yard sale clothes. Even the inner child, that old version of myself shut away inside, who requires my constant vigilance or she’ll still call the shots: “you’re dorky and different, you don’t fit in, keep a low profile and maybe no one will notice you don’t belong here.” She gets to shine too! She gets to open her eyes and say, “oh, right, things are different now. I’m an adult. I have skills. I’m not a kid wearing skirts over my snowpants anymore. I can show up as my brightest, fullest self. It’s safe to be seen.” It’s not my job to change Estelle—she has her own path to self-actualization, and she’ll find her way, just as I’ve found mine. My job is to recognize that I’m no longer the girl on the playground meekly explaining pants are against my religion. My job is to look at myself the way I looked at Estelle, to see my own brilliance and capacity, to stop playing small, stop worrying what other people think of me, and step into the biggest role I can fathom for myself. My job is actually very simple: to shine.  Yesterday I was supposed to have a date with this guy, I’ll call him Frank, who is very confident and possibly a little skeazy, so I was already a bit intimidated and could feel myself automating into Good Little Girl mode. I was tired, and it was a gorgeous Sunday, and Emm and I had just gotten to our beautiful housesit. I wanted to go on the date, but I didn’t want to go on the date. Driving two hours, what a pain, and this my last chance to rest up for the new week. And then, barely an hour before I should have been getting ready to go, Emm came and dumped on me the depths of her pain and rage over my latest return to dating—not, as I’d thought, because it triggered her pain over Phil’s death three years ago, at least not exclusively, but moreso it seems due to her pain over my abandonment, the way I disappear. It made perfect sense, and it cut me to the quick. Sent me plunging straight down a shame spiral of the fact that I am not a good father OR a good mother, because I can’t provide and I can’t nurture either. (This is not true, of course, but I always go to worst-case, black-and-white thinking in a shame response.) Oh, man, I just plummeted. I could see it happening, so there was that, but I didn’t have much energetic fuel in the tank with which to interrupt it, and anyway, to a certain extent those feelings simply need to be felt. So in the midst of this, I texted this guy Frank and canceled our date only a couple hours beforehand. I was so scared. I fully expected him to be angry, to accuse me of playing him, to be a dick about it—and when he wasn’t, when he was very sweet and understanding instead, it had me in tears. Well, I was in tears by then anyway. Then he called. I ignored the call. He texted, and I waited a couple hours to text back. I just didn’t have any energy to manage his feelings when I was already trying to manage my daughter’s and my own. And that’s when I realized that another of my challenges in love is shutdown mode. I was legitimately activated into a pain place and a shame spiral. Saying so to someone I’ve never met was much too vulnerable, but not saying so is also vulnerable, and I was in such anxiety over the anger he might direct towards me. From my shame place, I had no bandwidth for talking with him and communicating clearly about why I was canceling the date or when I could reschedule it or what was really going on. I just had no access. I had shut down. It’s a challenge that, for the duration of however much time I spend in a shame response, I stop being able to engage. It isn’t entirely fair to the other person. Yesterday I was thinking, how will I find a man compassionate enough to understand my trauma healing journey and the ways I’m learning to regulate myself back from a freeze-state shutdown? Today, though, I have access again to my rational thinking. And if I’ve learned one thing by now, it’s that the path to finding a compassionate partner is through being compassionate first to myself. If I can’t create safe, loving space for my own discomfort, no man ever will. So yesterday served as a reminder for me to hold my own pain gently. My daughter shared with me some ways that my behavior has hurt her, and in addition to supporting and validating her, I also had to support myself. It’s hard work. No saying, I’m still a recovering codependent, so in addition to managing my own big emotions, I was looking for the balance of how much it was appropriate for me to help my daughter manage hers—and if I had talked to Frank then, there was just no way I was not getting sucked into thinking I had to manage his. I’m glad I can let myself plummet now and feel the bad feelings, knowing that in a little while, I’ll be able to climb back up and out. At least I don’t have to hide from the feelings or do something self-destructive to make them go away. And I’m glad that, even though I sometimes still go into freeze-mode shutdowns under extreme emotions, I can take care of myself and hold my boundaries there. The rest will heal, as L. R. Knost writes, “not with time...but with intention.” I’ve come far enough to trust myself that I can get the rest of the way.  Weight is a thing for me. My isolated upbringing in a religious commune notwithstanding, American culture did a doozy on me, and by the end of my teens, my negative body image was well entrenched. It wasn’t even my body so much, it was me (already unworthy, as far as God and I were concerned) going around in a body, period. I was inherently flawed. So must my body be. I was a skinny teenager, but I watched my weight—if that’s what you call eating junk food and then berating myself for it. Estimating grams of fat in my head and fretting that I’d had too many. Having a pack of peanut M&Ms and balancing the anticipated pleasure of eating that delicious candy against the anticipated horror of gaining weight. I’m 5’10”, with a naturally slender build, but I have an anomaly: my big hips. (Sometime in my teenage years, some forgotten adult, probably a well-meaning woman who pitied me, told me that in pioneer days all the men would have wanted to marry me. Why? Because they’d see my wide hips and know they could take me off to a wilderness homestead and count on me to birth their babies without up and dying on them.) I have wide hips, wide shoulders, just a wide torso in general. This lack of adherence to the societal ideal has tortured me. My lovely slender build, these long arms and legs—“willowy,” I’ve often been called, and it was always my favorite adjective—and then, KLONK, these wide hips, this big bum, throwing off the balance, un-willowing me. Once in a while I would see a photo of myself taken from behind and be mortified, filled with shame and revulsion—I worked so hard to look okay by societal standards, to be as good-enough as I could be, and then I’d see those Benedict Arnold hips of mine, that big squishy butt. Don’t you guys get it? Don’t you get that I am working really hard to be skinny enough to deserve love, and you’re just squishing around like you can be as big as you want and there’ll be no price for me to pay?! I was 25, I’d left the church and had my first boyfriend, then my second; I was enjoying male satisfaction with my physique for the first time in my life, and I had this epiphany: my ass comprises the best curves I’ve got—I may as well own it! But those Teen Vogues came back to me, the few contraband copies I’d managed to see during my sheltered teenage years; I had internalized that a societally attractive woman has big breasts, not big hips, and even in the face of my partner’s approval, I still felt like the consolation prize. Sorry for my small boobies, but I’ve got a big juicy butt, so maybe that’s better than bad? In my mind, I was the consolation prize. Hence the great amount of energy I expended—more with the passing years—to stay as skinny as I could. I was 31 and married when I had my first real bout of anorexia: I wonder how little food I can eat in a day and still function? I wonder how skinny I can get if I eat as little as possible for months on end? I got real skinny. I got divorced. I gained the weight back. I judged myself. Whether I weighed more or less, I continued to self-identify as a consolation prize. Even when people called my body gorgeous, I never looked gorgeous to myself. I hit my 40s, I weighed the most I ever had, I found the guy I wanted to grow old with. Then he died suddenly, and the weight fell off me—turns out the grief diet is highly effective! I lost 40 pounds and found myself, mid-forties, back in the body I’d had as a 20-year-old. (The body of my 30s was actually skinnier, but that was self-starvation skinny, and I understood the difference.) Here was a different kind of consolation prize: your heart will be shattered, but hey, you’ll be skinny again. I looked in the mirror and there she was, willowy me. Gorgeous. But then I faced the challenge of how to stay willowy. So began a renewed obsession with my eating—is this too much? Is that? I’m hungry, but I don’t want to gain weight, so I should go without. Only I know myself now, and I know there’s no love in self-starving, no integrity in trying to abuse my body into looking a certain way. I’m too old for that crap. I can’t lose myself in that trance of self-loathing and control anymore. I know better. Two years after Phil’s death, I started a new relationship. By then I’d begun padding back out, and during the months Brian and I were together, all that weight that had fallen off me, fell right back on. It felt like my body was relaxing back into itself. I stared in the mirror like I always had, aiming a harsh, appraising eye at my belly and thighs. The bigger breasts were fine; the bigger bum I could own; the bigger stomach, though—unforgivable. Except that there was Brian saying, oh my god, you look so much better. BETTER? I showed him pictures of 30s me, ultra-skinny, back during the years when I felt good enough (though was unable to enjoy it because I had to calorie-restrict so obsessively from fear of becoming not good enough)—and he looked at them and said, “you look like you need a good meal.” WHAT? I was too skinny? That’s a thing? But—but—all those Teen Vogues! I thought being willowy was the only way I’d ever be loved! Yet Brian, the sole person who actually saw me naked, whose opinion of the flesh on my bones actually impacted me, was not saying, “should you eat that?” Instead, he’d catch me in that squinty-appraising moment before his full-length mirror and speak up at once: “I’m so glad I met you when you’d already put some weight back on, or it would have taken so much longer for you to get back to this.” The pudge, the pooch, the squish, everything bad and unlovable about my uncooperative, noncompliant, would-never-be-featured-in-Teen-Vogue body. I was desired for this. These Jezebel curves, my no-longer-willowy frame—all those years I tried to pretend myself away, horrified when I saw a photo that reminded me I was fooling no one but myself. Those skeletal mid-30s moments in the mirror when I nodded, “this is the body I’ve always wanted,” then peered a little closer and concluded, “well, once I’ve lost a little more off my thighs.” Those bony thighs had no more to lose. And I have no more time to waste in the pursuit of being willowy. It’s so funny to me that I spent decades believing that men would only love me skinny, and then one guy loved me soft instead, and my body image completely shifted. Perhaps it was the intense work I did, after Phil died, to learn finally to love myself. Perhaps it’s sobriety. Perhaps I’ve reached the age where it just feels like, ahhh, screw this. For years, I starved myself compulsively. I would finish my carefully-portioned meal, still feeling hungry, and forbid myself to take seconds: you’ve eaten enough to stay alive; that’s enough. How will you ever get skinny if you keep on eating til you’re satisfied? God forbid, right? God forbid that I be satisfied. God forbid that I have, let alone be, enough. This is my gift of love to myself, decades overdue—that I eat when I’m hungry. That I enjoy peanut M&Ms every single day. That I shop for size 12 trousers and don’t promise myself I’ll be a 6 again next year. After some months single, I’m toying with dating again, and as I do, I realize that I’ve kept the stunning knowledge of myself as desirable for my softness, not in spite of it. Still the prize, but without the consolation—suddenly, late-40s, after a lifetime of self-loathing and self-starvation, I look in the mirror at my societally unapproved curves and think, gorgeous.  This time of year, dawn walking is a serenade. Red-winged blackbird. Hermit thrush. Kingbird with its black crest. Listening to them, I never heard the deer, and would have continued past them unaware had not my eye been caught by their white flags waving as they scattered through the woods. I was relieved the Canada geese flew away and took their cacophonous honking with them the moment I arrived, leaving me to the peace of morning birdsong and the solitude of the tiny plover winging across the lake. It's three years now since I lost him, and this morning I can only think what a metamorphosis I’ve undergone. Sometimes it’s shocking how vivid the memories still are, how viscerally I feel them. He’s been gone more than half again as long as we were even together; lately I’m coming increasingly to understand that the depth of my grief is due in part to the extent of what I lost, not just the man I loved, but the home we shared, the family we nurtured, the life I had waited so long to create. My security. I had found a place where I could finally plant a flag and say, this is mine, this is where I belong. And then it shattered, and the persistent grief is a testament, not just to the loss of love, but of home and community and belonging: my sense of safety. I have passed a majority of my adulthood charting unknown territories for myself; I have staggering resilience and an explorer’s heart, but I’ve been instinctively homing in on a destination that continually shifts and eludes me. Explorers know that the journey is the destination, and that even when we find what we seek, it seldom looks how we expected. The other night my daughter remarked, “I didn’t really have a childhood home,” referring to the frequency of our changes of address—a year here, two years there—but the fact is, I am her home, and I suppose I am my own now also. We moved to a new country when she was turning seven, we are still working to establish ourselves here, and to reestablish ourselves after Phil‘s death—our journey itself has been her childhood home, and in this sense we’re growing up together. I could compare us endlessly against other families who are more rooted, but at the same time I acknowledge the part of me that has always loved rootlessness. The freedom to pick up at a moment’s notice and try something new. Getting older, raising a child, has awakened my yearning for security; grieving the loss of my presumed destination upended me; but equally real is the intrepid part of me that rubs its hands in anticipation as it asks, what’s my next adventure? Someday, I expect that adventure will be the establishment of a long-term home, a place I can hang my hat in. It will come with a loss, as all gains do: achieving this means releasing that, and every choice has a cost. I acknowledge my ongoing grief for the loss of the man and the life that I called home, even as my eye is caught by a white waving flag in the woods beckoning me toward this wide-open world of my own possibility. The opportunity now is for me to claim my power to create safety again. I had something I treasured; I lost it—what shall I build now?  This week was Beltane, the ancient festival of fertility. Since my partner’s death on summer solstice in 2021, I’ve begun tuning into the Celtic holidays, slowly creating my own small rituals to honor them. For Beltane, I like to light a fire (camping is ideal, though I didn’t manage that this year), and beyond that, I pretty much focus on bats.
Yes, bats. I know not everyone’s a fan. But I had a specific interaction with a bat two years ago that solidified them as my Beltane animal guide. It was 2022, and I’d taken my daughter camping in Vermont at the end of April vacation. We were driving home around midday on Beltane, and as we zoomed along the interstate at 70 mph or so, what should fly toward me but…a bat. Did I mention it was the middle of the day? Did I mention I was going 70 mph? I saw it fluttering along ahead of me in batlike fashion and had several seconds to ponder is that seriously a bat before I whipped by. But it was a bat, no question. Flying down the middle of the highway in the hot sunshine—not the most typical presentation. So of course when I got home that night, I did what I always do after a noteworthy animal encounter and looked up the meaning of bats. Sometimes I have to google my way through a lot of nonsensical websites to find anything that clicks (now I have a couple good guidebooks that are more reliable), but there’s always that moment of resonance when my body says yes, that in recognition of why this particular animal came to me at this particular time. With the Beltane bat, it was when I read that bats are a keystone species. Keystone species are a wonder in themselves—animals that are crucial to the survival of an ecosystem. Bats tick this box by propagating plants. How do they do this? They eat the plants and poop out the seeds. Like Johnny Appleseed, except with poop. I found this so beautiful. It landed with me on several levels, but to sum it up, the message of my Beltane bat was this: God wants my shit to grow flowers. When we think of fertility, prosperity, it tends to be pretty picturesque. What I love most about the imagery of the Beltane bat is that the focus is not on perfection—quite the opposite. The only thing in nature more inherently gross than poop is a rotting carcass. (Unless you’re a vulture. Which is part of why vultures are such a beautiful bird to me—they transmute death into life.) The Beltane bat reminds me that it’s the ugliest, messiest, most painful moments of my life that foster my growth. And I don’t say that lightly. The day the Beltane bat flew by me, I was still in my first year of deep grief over the sudden death of the man I’d planned to grow old with—I had all the shit, none of the flowers, and I sure wasn’t saying “oh goody, I’m so happy my beloved died! Now I get to grow and evolve!” But I was aware of my growth and evolution. I didn’t “accept” Phil’s death, but I agreed with it: yes, this happened, it’s what’s so, and I’m going to live in reality and feel what I feel, instead of trying to hide from it or pretend it away. In hindsight, those were my first flowers—those moments where I said, “I agree with reality,” howled with my heartache, but didn’t numb out or try make it go away. At first, it was challenge enough just to stay present, to stay alive. Eventually I had more moments of proactivity, where I reached out to initiate a change of direction in my life. And over time, my shit has grown flowers. Doesn’t make it all better. Just means there are flowers now too. The fertility I’m celebrating this Beltane isn’t that of the beautiful blossoms with their fragrant faces lifted to the sun, but the dark, dirty soil from which they grew. To me, that’s what makes this a day for women to celebrate. It reminds us to honor our awfullest moments for the possibilities they fertilize. It’s a celebration of how we reach within ourselves, face what hurts without running away, and gradually, as one season follows on another, transmute death into life. Even as we light a fire, we remember where all new life begins: in the dark.  Yesterday was in the 50s; tomorrow we’re expecting a foot and a half of snow. Today, impending storm notwithstanding, I am so cognizant of spring. Nowadays it’s much more than just the weather—it’s an energetic experience that I feel, not just see. Or rather, regardless of what I see, whether it’s migratory birds beginning their nests or snow obliterating the spring crocuses, I can feel the energy of spring pulsing behind it. The time of new beginnings—but new beginnings require endings, too.
Three summers ago, after the sudden death of my life partner, I took to walking the long wooded driveway where my daughter wouldn’t hear me cry, and that’s how I discovered that walking was incredibly beneficial to my mental health. Since then I’ve never missed a single day, which means it’s nearly three years now that I have observed the seasons’ progression, daily watching the shift from lush summer to dry autumn to dark winter to bright springtime. I’ve internalized that autumn’s withering and winter’s hibernation are a necessary precursor to the blossoming of spring. But this spring, I’m aware of more: the energetic shift. I had a long, dark winter, literally and figuratively, but my entire being has awakened now. My energy has exploded. My awareness has shifted from my internal world to the external one. Change is happening everywhere, and I am also causing it to happen. Nearly two weeks ago, for equinox, I drew a tarot spread for the next three months of springtime, and the primary card was the Tower: change is coming! Big change, possibly cataclysmic change, which made me feel nervous and victimy until I realized, well then, why wait for it to happen to me? Why not take back my power and cause some change? So I got busy. I released a romantic connection that no longer felt vitalizing. I relaunched an old program just because I love it. I stopped talking about moving house and made a specific plan. Oh, and after spilling a cup of coffee across my laptop last week, I made one more change I’d been adamantly avoiding: I gave up recreational screen time, meaning no movies, news, or social media for a month. YIKES. I don’t think I could accommodate all this change at one time if it weren’t for springtime and my attunement to it from daily walking in nature. Something primal inside me is powering me, transmuting this seasonal energy into personal energy—I don’t know how else to describe it: I am fueled by spring. I think this is how we always lived. Before we cut ourselves off from the earth and moved indoors to worship at the shrine of screen entertainment instead. I’m not advocating for a return to subsistence farming and living in lean-tos; I just know that, in fewer than three years of practicing presence in the natural world, seasonal energy has become a power source I can consciously plug into. And as I write that, I recognize the connection between that and unplugging from screens, that this is in fact a natural next step. My realization that I was checking out from my life through screen entertainment, a lot, didn’t happen in a vacuum: it happened in the wild energetic unfolding of springtime and my own conscious presence within it. Winter regenerates the soil in preparation for springtime growth. I just didn’t realize it would work that way inside me, too—if I let it. Tomorrow’s snowstorm notwithstanding, spring is underway, and all I really have to do is be present and let it unfold. Say yes to the changes. Acknowledge the sadness of the undesired endings, embrace the exhilaration of the new beginnings. This is the natural way of things; my mind may push back, but when I get present, my body knows how.  There is a fragility to love that I didn’t understand eighteen years ago, though I glimpsed it that morning as I watched my mother die. She was unconscious. Her pain was managed. Her husband and four children were around her. Then she was gone, and we were left to begin learning the art of loving once you realize you have everything to lose.
Fifteen years later, I lost again, this death sudden, the man I had thought I would grow old with. In a few days it’ll be the equinox, the seasonal reminder of his death on solstice, two and three-quarters years ago. Tonight I put on music while I cleaned the house, and to my own surprise, I started playing songs that had been an “our song” with different of my partners from days gone by. I Choose You, by Sara Bareilles. By My Side, by Sadet. Endless Love, featuring Mariah Carey. To my own surprise, they cut me, made me feel somehow deeply alone, and then I realized, well, what did I expect on a day like this? The cultural fairy tale is that you’ll live happily ever after. The reality is, you can lose for good the one you hold most dear. At the risk of sounding cliche, I have to say, this makes me love more, not less. It’s true that you hold your loved ones closer after a loss, you appreciate them more. And then pretty soon you’re back to snarking and picking petty fights, because you don’t stop being human when a loved one dies, you just hang suspended a little while. My feeling lonely tonight was only a case of projecting my grief: I miss my mother. There’s no replacing that person who knew you literally from the first moment of your life, there’s no replicating the knowledge of yourself held by the person who was your witness from the start. Mumma was my mirror. When she died, I lost a piece of my self-understanding, the part of me that had always been defined by how she reflected me back to myself. Eighteen years later, I still miss her, but the missing no longer stings—except occasionally, on days like today, when that vagrant thought wanders in, what would it be like if she’d lived? It’s a futile question. More useful is pondering the fragility of love, that no matter what, one way or another, I will lose the people I hold most dear. And yes, that’s scary. But it also allows me to hold love more gently than I used to, with cupped hands—recognizing that I never know when something may shatter. That love is more precious when I carry it alongside the awareness that at some point, inevitably, I will pay for it with pain—but let that come in its time; today, when the reality is sweetness, revel in it. I learned I don’t have control over when I lose the people I love. I learned I do have control over loving as deeply and richly as I can, while I can. Love is fragile. I honor the pain of my own losses—and, side by side with that, more and more I celebrate the joy of those relationships, because none of them are lost to me in the end.  The other day, my daughter asked how old her youngest cousin is. I paused to do the math: he’s going on three years old now. Which is when it hit me: we made it. We passed that two-years-eight-months mark, and in a sense, everything now is a bonus. Em would have had a much older cousin, 18 now, but Paige was diagnosed with a severe form of leukemia when she was twenty months old, and she died a year later. When Em was born five years after that, I was consumed with anxiety for all the ways I could lose her, and part of me held my breath without realizing it until we hit two years, eight months. Like that was an invisible hurdle that signaled safe passage from then on. The heartbreakingly short life of my niece, and the symbolic victory of each other child I’ve loved who’s lived beyond it, has nothing to do with today’s anniversary: two years and eight months since my life partner died. But somehow it feels like a sacred milestone nonetheless. I’ve loved and lost three irreplaceable people—my mother and Paige close to each other, both of drawn-out terminal illness, followed by a fifteen-year grace period before Phil simply disappeared one day, kissing me goodbye as he left the house, never to return. Hard as it was to watch people I adored shrivel and suffer under the assault of cancer, I have to say that for my sake, I preferred it to having my beloved simply vanish. No opportunity to talk about the things we’d never quite gotten around to talking about. To resolve dangling conversations. To know what all his passwords were. To say goodbye. But here I am, two years and eight months later, and I’ve rebuilt my life. I had a memory today of him in politics and was smacked again with the regret that he didn’t get to fulfill on all the good he wanted to do. He had such a big vision. I miss the vitality that he, more than any man I’ve ever known, embodied. Over and over after he died, I asked him to share that with me. I need your vitality. Please give me some vitality. Please help me. Funny thing about that is, when I went back to work two years ago, it was in the field of recovery, his field, which then led to my getting this job working with trauma, where I’ve come to understand that Phil’s seemingly bottomless vitality was in fact a constant activation of his fight-or-flight stress response. Riding a toxic high of his own stress chemicals. I have indeed developed a much greater energy in my work than I’ve ever had before, but I also recognized my own tendency to flip-flop between being fueled by stress chemicals and then hitting my wall and plunging into absolute collapse. Vitality this is not. I wish I’d understood back then, when maybe I could have helped Phil learn the balance I am establishing now. But I’ve had two years and eight months now to find my footing in this new world I never wanted, the world where my life beside him was over, our plans dissolved, my future a great blank that I must figure out how the hell to fill in instead, when the only life I wanted was the one I’d just lost. It’s a triumph to be here, I acknowledge this milestone. I celebrate my survival. I honor my recovery. And I own my vitality: the capacity to live my life more fully than ever, to dive in with both feet not just in spite of what I’ve lost, but because of it. I didn’t want this life. But since I have it, I claim it: it is mine, and I will live it with every ounce of vitality I’ve got, for as many more cycles of two-years-eight-months as I get.  It’s New Year’s Day, and something more: incredibly enough, today is also my seven year, seven month, and seven days sobriety anniversary! Now if that is not the perfect way to launch a new year, I do not know what is. Christmas is over at last, and despite it being my favorite holiday, like every year I am immensely relieved that it’s behind us. I need all the fuss to be over. Maybe it happens every winter, but this is only the second I’ve noticed it: a going-inward, one that is of the body and the spirit as well, a physiological urge to step back, stay in, get still. Not just a yearning for silence, but a knowing: this is what’s needed. I write about this a lot, about my new connection to nature. I’m not a nature writer per se, just a woman whose beloved died, and I didn’t want to cry in front of my daughter all the time, so I started walking up the driveway to cry where she couldn’t hear me, and then I discovered that walking up and down the driveway was incredibly soothing. So I did it a lot. And after some weeks went by, I realized it wasn’t just the walking that soothed me, it was being outside under the sun and the trees. After some months, I realized I was only doing as well as I was, mentally, because of my walking. So I made it a practice, a self-care baseline: every day, no matter what, I will walk outside. Always once, usually twice. And as I tended to my mental health this way, I witnessed the progression of the seasons, I discovered the guidance of nature, and I was gobsmacked to realize, hey, this feels good. This feels like, I dunno, the way I was created to live. In tune with the seasons instead of oblivious. Immersed in my natural environment instead of removed. We live in a world that has forgotten the listening part, that no longer teaches us to move in rhythm with the seasons. And I like this world too! I like screens, and cars, and having the knowledge base of all humanity available to be searched in an instant whenever I wonder what that South American lake with the floating islands is called or what exactly is Tom Hanks’ net worth. I like staying up past sunset in the glow of artificial lights, I like my pedestal fan in the summertime and my electric heater in winter, I like taking a hot shower whenever I want—I am not someone who aspires to build my straw-bale home into the side of a hill and drink milk from my own goats as I preserve the summer’s harvest in my own mason jars. I like things to be easy. Of course, it’s all about moderation, right? Because the notion of following the seasons has been transformational for me. Simply to notice, and not through the window, but by being in it, feeling it on my skin. This summer it occurred to me that in New Hampshire there is NO SUCH THING AS AN IDEAL TIME OF YEAR—winter is frigid, summer you get eaten by bugs, and somehow this was freeing, to realize I didn’t need to idealize one time of year over another. They’re ALL uncomfortable. And at the same time, they’re all beautiful, staggeringly so. This is what I have discovered, that the chill of autumn is refreshing when you’re protected with hat and gloves, that the flooding of springtime can be accommodated with a good pair of rubber boots—in short, there is no weather that can’t be enjoyed as long as you have appropriate gear. And that the seasons are a map. When you get here, go all out. When you get there, pause. That’s what winter is to me now, the pause. My urge to turn inward kicks in mid-November, as the cold sharpens and the light fades and the animals disappear. For weeks I saw porcupines gorging themselves in the tree branches, and now they have disappeared. There was no white Christmas this year, and the turkeys and squirrels still crunch persistently through the dry leaves. Everyone knows it’s time to get quiet and settle in. Wait out the winter. Not because it’s some season of frigid punishment, but because it’s a reset, a chance to curl up in a small, still place and rest. I always dreaded the endurance of this season. But it’s the restfulness of winter I notice now, the pause. Enough with the busy-busy, the rush-rush; my body says, no, that’s for the long bright days, and this is the slow dark season. The quiet is waiting for me. The inward urge is my self-invitation: be still, turn within, and know me better. |
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