Recently, I chose to take a walk in the morning. A walk that expressed a secret longing. This longing to potentially stumble into whom I was so missing. Someone who I still deeply cared for despite our mutual departure.
As I walked, I quietly greeted all that I had been unwilling to face with the companion of movement. Of change and shifting of place. As I see how transition is so touched in the shifting of body. Especially with this transition of a break up.
I walked and welcomed all that was beckoning. Being open to conversation with sand, salt, and stone. As well as the morning walkers, runners, and those in touch with wind and air. Of them grackles and mourning doves.
I said 'hi' to them all, knowing how a presence of greeting could allow me to express how I wanted to know them all. Even in this space of mourning, one shallow as I gazed at the grackles upset with how I forget their names. And one deep: a throbbing pain glancing at people with companions, seeing togetherness as reminders of loss. Loss of the one who I so loved.
Greeted back by the elements, I grew into conversation with all that was near. And I wrote down some of those nearings:
Sometimes I would feel like a tattered piece of bark, so longing to reconnect to the groves that once stood. And other times, I would feel mighty sad—a hysterical sorrow. Tears welling up and out as I settled to how I may never express love to her in the same familiar ways. I held watered eyes sprinkled in a glaze of both joy and pain.
Realizing what I was missing was quite like ways of expression that felt like coming home.
And as I walked, I continued on to enter the reservation path. A path secluded from cars, homes, and all the premises that felt somewhat empty of life.
So, I entered in its fullness and exited my evaluations how I wanted community and transporation to be expressed.
In the reservation, so gentle was the wind and brush in contrast to the sorrow and pain strewn in my heart. Hurt from the noticing how both gentleness and air have been restricted in how I was living. How I was processing what was still alive in my relationship to her and shutting down. Shutting down my own emotions for relief, as I did not feeling safe to express out all that was felt.
I continued to walk, metabolizing this conversation. Being so nourished in that shock of how I had separated from myself facing the separation of another.
Reaching a bend, I rested in a gazebo atop one of the vistas of the reserve. As I felt this need to reside where I was, in solitude, to explore what was so coming together in my heart. In that resting, I felt this particular sorrow. A feeling of absence. Away from her and of her familiar presence. Her presence at once grounding and welcoming.
Bending into the ringed bands of recollection, I remembered how I have walked this same path alongside her a few times. With how her presence once greeted me in a cherishing welcome in every step we took together. A lilting relationship of reciprocation, as I welcomed her back by beholding her presence. I felt an endearing grief for its leaving. As I realize that gifting exchange may not be possible with how things are now.
Then somehow, something emerged within me. This fierce remembering of grief rituals. Something I have only read about and still have never formally participated in.
I looked around to the neighbors for things of altar.
I gathered all that was near, picking up exactly what had fallen and found sanctuary on the ground: a stick, an acorn, a leaf, and a rock.
As I placed the stick flat on the bench I saw upon, I gently expressed how it could represent anger. The anger I felt that was a passion for what could be in contrast to what was.
Rubbing the acorn, I felt its split. Perhaps a messanger for how our split could be also be this seed of openness. I enjoyed that yet also felt that edge of all that had divided.
With the leaf, brown and fragile, I tapped into what was decomposing. What was dying in the cycles of renewal that I needed to honor.
Touching the rock, I felt reverence to the grooved weathered change, only relenting in the soft roughening of wind, water, and the wakeful earth-nudgings.
And in the middle, I placed a bark blanketed in lichen, for what still grows in separation from home.
And from these elemetns of grief, I felt that home near. Of her familiar presence that still lingers. The voice once warm now cold. As I reflect on how I had not expressed to her in a way accessible to her. In a way sensitive to her needs and longings for space.
I lingered back to the leaf, weighing how I was starting to drop who I once remembered her to be. In that fragile of browning, so easily brushed in the wind. I did not brush aside my memory of her but fell into the ground of clarity. I was reminded by the stone of this clearness where I was not longer a stone skipping over the lake of reality but settling as stone to sink into its depeer truth. That I had to release my fragile expectations in all that was decomposing between us. Else, their death would never be renewed stuck in resentment. I could say it felt the same way a composer scribes an ink-felt coda to end a melody of magic in my honoring of the ends that so longed for meaning.
I reached down to place the leaf once again seeing them fall off the side of the bench.
So teasing me to let go and fall so deciduously into a hibernative rest.
With the ritual in place, I held space to explore my longing for her deeper.
To me, she was this universe in verse. Verse where letters and words could only echo the song we played. Those letters and words only leaves to the rooted memories of being with her. For they were so rooted in something so familiar. A sense of home.
And searching back to the stick, hurt spun to frustration as I so longed to reconnected to what had been uprooted. A communication where I did not have to guess, a knowing where I had clarity that my messages were listened to, and the felt sense of wonder for how deeply I wanted to care for her in familiar ways. And those familiar ways to be lost.
I started to realize I felt anger not because I wanted her or I to change but for the loss of that familiar. Those familiar gazes we shared, knowing that in the witnessing of each other, we started to see ourselves more deeply. The intimate caress of our lips brushing each other, teasing into kisses. And hugs where I felt my shape so unbound bordered by her touch.
So, I became lost.
I gandered back to the stone. Speaking to weathering and movement slow enough to make paint crawl. As I knew that though I felt so weathered and slowed down with my processing of pain, even in my adolescent impatience I wanted to honor the slowness of change.
And how most of my growth has come from presence, like resting stones, where one of way of its strengthening, changing, and transforming is in its yielding to conversations of heat and pressure.
Heat and pressure... I deeply connected to that. As I remembered my close friend's quoting of Malidoma Somé who expressed that "Conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking itself to depeen."
And being in the conflict that I was in, feeling the gap between how I wanted things to be and how they were and being that chasm. I started to touch the darkness that wanted me to descend back to a home only known through feeling the pain of how being in relationship also somehow compromised my own self-love. And compromised my other relationships with the safety, reassurance, and relief I felt sharing presence with her. That I forgot I could share that same safety, reassurance, and relief with others.
Yet, I still balance that in reflection to how I have grown in my other relationships with her space that felt like a space to breathe. To sigh and not be judged.
And though I was so torn hearing back from her how she had moved on in contrast to how I still wanted to share with her my grief and process together, I am still holding her in my heart. With my sorrow to how I may have contributed hurt in her. By not respecting her need for space and expecting her to be available to tend to me when she was reconnecting with herself.
And the many times I was not sensitive to her needs and feelings. And how tiring it was for her when I only held my own intensely, forgetting the balance we once had.
And I am holding her near because I coming to know my grief—and all my feelings—to not betray me. Only with the gentle discernment to know that moving on does not mean carrying my feelings but that my feelings could be a canary that sang to the song of the world that respected creation. In its moving on in cycles of death, birth, and renewal based on the honoring of both.
So I rested in those transitional spaces. Of both collapse and rising. Of both a break up and reconnection. Remembering that fallen tree on the path to the bend, laying on concrete and dirt that so longed to return to nourish their roots.
So I was that tree, being in that transition where the unknown touched my known body. That unknown nudging me to not assume things about her. With how her irresponsiveness was not an expression of her not caring for me. As I started to meet her care, seeing how she was holding space for herself to process and reflect, so she could communicate to me fully in touch to what was within her.
I sank into relief realizing that, as I came to know that I could love her from a distance. Expanding the home of my heart to include even what has been lost. So much so that there was no distance between her presence and mine. No breaking in a break up as I was already broken. As I returned to how I do not want to be 'healthy' or 'functional' when much of the world is in collapse from its obsession to fix things.
I lost the premise that love ends when things depart yet am still holding loss.
I became lost.
Remembering how when I heard she wanted to leave I saw her remain largely unaffected. Not expressing any upset for our departure. And remembering how she once valued my communication. In a heart-wrenching contrast to all the moments I struggled to in the moments that so needed me to express.
Maybe I am being called to further explore what is unfamiliar to me. As I am unshedding the gratitude behind grief as I come so deeply aware of feeling how much I loved her once.
And what a gift it is to love.