uncharted

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?