But using the word “journey” implies movement, so I take another step and focus on “there WAS ONCE a time…” and allow myself, my body, to feel the passage of time. The changing of the people I claim as family. The miracle of finding those who also claim me as their own. Yes, there was once a time. It has passed. What remains is to be brave and step into what is, now.
Late Autumn is, in the words of Maia Toll, a “time between endings and new beginnings, the liminal space within our own heart is most easily accessed.” Toll encourages us: “Give yourself room to dream into this deeply mystical season.”
Grief is like an ever-present fog. Sometimes it grows wispy and light, and the ache attaches to a sense of beauty and awe. That familiar painful knowing that this world is magical precisely because it is fleeting. Other times, it sinks low and heavy, making it difficult to navigate the day, replacing wonder with the weight of absence and loss.
First and foremost, the transition into awareness each morning. The knowing that I am breathing and alive. And that when my eyes open, I can still see. Blurry though it may be some days. That next to me is my amazing wife and that we are waking into a life we have dedicated ourselves to building together. For the morning flurry on workdays because we each have work to get to and enjoy spending our…
It is an unwellness that is troubling me. I am having anxiety symptoms lying in bed at night. Is my heart racing because I’m having a tachardic episode or is this anxiety triggering my racing heart? The question itself causes anxiety. It makes for challenging nights. And I am tired.
I’ve known that anxiety was a foreign feeling to my wife for quite some time. I remember the incredulity I felt when she first told me. It was as if hearing that some people can hold their breath without dying or that there are people that never feel sad during the holidays. When the pandemic changed her experience with anxiety, my response was a confusing mixture of sadness that she was going through it, concern about how she would learn to cope with it, and the slightest bit of relief that perhaps now she would be more understanding of what I live with. I’m not proud of that last bit but who doesn’t want to be understood better?
Awe and wonder. The way that hearing birds chirping first thing in the morning feels like a thread connecting me to every ancestor I’ve never known but whose DNA is in my body. They knew birds, I’m certain of it.
And leaves. And rain and sunshine. Some of them knew love and what it was like to give life and to keep that life going long enough to grow into their own being with the next generation of us.
When I want to know the quiet of time before too much technology and too many people, nature lets me tap into that deep history.
In the book God in All Worlds, Lucinda Vardey writes “I believe we begin our search for meaning with doubt, pain, and a lot of questions” (3). In Buddhism, many of the teachings are about how to move beyond suffering. The people I grew up with turn to the Christian God when they are in pain, scared, confused. For myself, the least authentic approach to Spirit is the path of pain and suffering. Prayer becomes…
As I was reading last night, I had my television on and tuned to my Chromecast. I wasn’t streaming anything through the Chromecast, just enjoying the slideshow that it displays by default. I looked up from my book at one point, and had to stop reading so that I could spend as much time with the photograph on the screen as the slide show would allow. A pier beckoning the viewer out onto a serene lake, the photograph was…
Other than adversity, where else is there a third path? Not only in ways of responding to situations around us and within us but to seeing the world in general. How often do I get stuck in this or that, either/or thinking?