I am out on a farm grateful for the space to further process the fracture from someone I was held by and deeply close to. And during the day, some others and I took up the quest of freeing some tendrils of peas from trellises to make way for a new season.
Under the glimmering sun—so radiant with its rays—I sweat and grew close to the clothes on my body. Wiping sweat and grateful that I could absorb all this delightful experience. As I disentangled some trellises, I came into contact to entanglement. The creativity to say that no two things are quite separate as they seem. And how I held entanglement by touching the entanglement of pea and trellise.
And I also connected to an element of grief. This gate of grief where I had to mourn the full fabric of the relatonship. As I saw into how in the disposing of the plastic trellises, they could so harm other creatures in capture and its netting. As I touched the fabric of how a relationship can both strangle and support. Both healing and hurting. Both snare of a trap and of drum.
I traced my fingers on my arms, settling deeper in my experience. I really connected into a question: "How could my relationship be both comforting and constricting?"
I leaned into how growth comes through by stretching. Opening and expanding into places unfamiliar with the familiarity of practice, resource, and relationship. And how I have bent, stretched, and learned so much from being with her. From being supported by her.
My heart then circulated to a beating, unsettling hurt and bereaving. A wistful longing to return to what was. As I turned to memories of reciprocation, teary-eyed gazes, hugs of safety and sharing. Yet also a hurt to what used to be. With how I hurt my family sharing with her so deeply, I disengaged with sharing all that I needed and so longed to share in the safety of her presence.
How that in my sensitivity to her, I could sometimes lapse in sensitivity to my inner home.
Later on in the day after our little community completed some tarping and weeding, we continued on to the bindweed expressing something similar to the peas. The bindweed so binded to some wired fences that protected some of the beds for safety.
Yet, though I would say they beautifully decorated the fence, we considered bineweed to be encroaching on the plants inside. And I stayed with those sentiments. Once again connecting to grief.
As I unraveled, unwrapped, and pulled the roots of the bineweed, I noticed how their tendrils expressed strength. Of hugging deeply the connected they sensed into to create a home through coherence. And I noticed a texture of loss. A loss expressed through how some of the wilted and alive bineweed entangled themselves in connection.
And seeing this, I deeply touched what it meant to be hurt in connection. To face all that is withering and wilting in contrast to all the memories of joy with her. I connected to a grief that mourns each and every connection. These connections I would no longer have the familiarity of making in direct presence with her. How I could see something or hear something and want to share with her. Almost as if this reflex of second-nature. And how that may no longer be a possibility.
And how I connected to grief in this helical, twirling fashion. With how removing bineweed from a fence requires careful attention when wanting to remove them intact and in succession. As each connection and bind needed to be released... and as I took part of that ritual, I connected to how each connection I made with her needed to be grieved.
To twirl around each, sensing their full experience of joy and fulfillment and how these may strangle me if I hold resentment for how I may no longer connect to them in the same way.
Terry Tempest Williams put it well:
Grief dares us to love once more.
And how I dare to love her once more. And to uncountable lengths because I know how much it hurts to minimize how much I feel for others. With how that my expression outward interdepends on how I relate to myself inside.
The bineweeed was a missive to love as helix. This winding vine of emergent convergence that only happens in relationship. Of a resolved determination to continue to come back to a home created. As I could not see her as a decoration or mere chapter of my life. Knowing her story as solitude bordering mine. And knowing all that she was struggling with that I felt open and available to support.
And I would not say our relationship ended, as I know in leaving there is always a silent staying. However hidden that I may keep it in shutting my sensitivities down. As I know my emotions and thoughts enough not to treat them as dirty cltohes only to be washed. Cleansed of their impurities. But how distillation of the mystery of myself only came in transmuting the impurity through deep intimacy with their contradictory allegiances.
As distillation first begins in the coarse reflection that the mirror is not unclean but I am. I am one the one in need of refreshment and nourishment. So, I tune into what needs to be refreshed in the rejuvenating breeze of feeling.
On holding tenderness
There is a certain gravity of being in relationship to the land. Time unwinds and sighs out into presence. I unwinded in this passing of time, unwinding the connections that once supported me. And laying them in the soil where they could rest, decompose, and possibly regenerate. I, too, followed this in resting my heart in its grief. The grief I once so left unattended on the ground.
Grounded in the rootedness of uprooting. With how I realized I was treating my grief like carpet hair, forgetting its instance of existing and wanting to get rid of it in its disturbing sight. As I realized how often I treat my emotions as this illness to normality when all emotions simply ask to be felt. And I realize how I was stepping over myself in my expression to tame something that simply needed to be felt, released, and honored.
For those emotions and signals needed to be met with acceptance, affection, and heartfelt touching. As I know if I do not, then I will lose the ability to touch all that is inside myself. As I know holding tenderness to heal, especially in times of grief. Which I was reminded by from someone of the farm beside me (I APPRECIATE YOU JULIET <3)
I connected so deeply to how I so need to create a tender space for my presence. Since I reflected on how many of my relationships with others may not be available to receiving all that I feel and want to share.
Later in the day, longing to find a tree to suppport a handstand. I ventured out to a place where I once met some Airbnbers who happened to stay on the farm.
Following the bend in the gravel path and entering a gate of trees, I reached the outlook into the valley with some chairs and a firepit. And I saw someone comforted by the warmth of a fire.
It was Jasmine, who I met earlier today and was staying at the Airbnb, and I hesitated to say 'hi' as I still wanted to practice some handstands. And I immeditely noticed Jasmine's strength of openness and assertiveness when she called me in to share space with her.
I settled down next to her on one of the chairs, reclining back to take in what was happening both inside and out.
As we gazed both starry-eyed toward a symphony of fireflies lighting up the periphery of the dark. I tuned into the sensory of this enchanting but completely silent firework display. Jasmine reminisced about how this was rare for her to see so many fireflies as she savored the experience. I followed that intiation. To savor this experience.
With smoke welling from the flames of hte fire pit, the wind intiated us into movement. Like this silent invitation to move from the familiar and explore adjusting into the unknown. Almost as if the world was asking us to shift from the smokescreens of our minds.
I shared about how I was going through a break up and how I then was so surprised to hear how Jasmine was also experiencing something similar. A break from the ordinary presence of her partner.
She shared about her experience of turning toward her need of space in her with her lover. I felt so mirrored in her sharing, knowing how my lover was so longing for me to connect to my need of processing in solitude and away from our shared presence. So, I connected deeply to how crossing her boundary, which I did not quite understand, would have felt hurting. Not only because I simply wanted to communicate with her but how I gave her so many opportunities to hurt me in my vulnerable sharing. And to hear back about how she was discarding all my messages, I felt so isolated.
And from Jasmine's sharing of her experience, she told me how that sometimes the greatest way I can love someone is by letting go. Hearing that, I immediately drew to how I was really uncomfortable with leaving her fully. Even though I could see how that could be one question this conflict was asking of me.
"Do I leave? Do I stay?"
A trial of growth only found in our separation.
Writing this now and looking out a window, I was vined in delicate observance of a chested heartache. A restriction of circulation. The fibers of my body turning against in protest to what has been observed. What was being processed. And the many times I opposed this process. As I know opposing what is being processed to arrest the life within me.
Two questions pulsed within me as I touched my pain, remembering Jasmine.
"Who am I without them?"
"who am I when I realize I am still here, breathing and intact?"
Wanting the intimacy someone offers without doing the work of understanding how power, oppression, and history shape who they are and who you become together isn’t love. It’s extraction. It’s the same relationship colonialism taught us to have with the Earth: take what nourishes you without taking responsibility for the conditions that make it possible.
—eroticsofliberation
I would say I hold the quality of sensitivity so close to me. I could touch a feather and be pricked in delight from all its minute textures and brushing tickles. As I connect to something someone once said about sensitivity in the culture we live in:
When they tell you you’re too emotional, what they mean is: your emotions are inconvenient to capitalism.
When they say you’re too sensitive, what they mean is: your sensitivity makes them uncomfortable with their own numbness.
When they call you difficult, what they mean is: you won’t pretend dysfunction is normal.
I deeply remember all the times that I have been so sensitive to how I expressed to her that when I came into direct contact to how that may not mean I will reciprocated with that back, I deeply ached. I deeply ached because of how she could not hold my pain in a way that gave it space to breathe. And I tune into how I may have been expecting something of her that she was struggling to give to herself. Compassion, feeling, and regulating in the intensity of feelings that often are distorted into strategies of self-harm.
And near when we mutually decided to split, I could feel hurt for how she could only relate to my emotions in this therapeutic way. That she wanted to fix me rather than see me. And how I could sense that pressure in her gaze whenever I expressed pain to her.
And to connect this to the quote, I could see how my emotions were inconvenient to her. They were places where she did not want to inhabit with me fully, as those same places are mirrored within herself.
I could also remember how she once expressed to me how she was uncomfortable being sensitive to how she expressed to me. Which really contributes to my connection to how my sensitivity could have made her uncomfortable with realizing how her words were not so much chosen but reacted. And how I could hurt so deeply when she spoke from the surface rather than from her sensuous self that can feel deeply enough to care for how another receives our words.
As that was who I am. I say was because it is so challenging and radical to be in touch with the wounds of the world. As Ailey Jolie puts it in the felt sense of how
We feel the pesiticides in our wombs. The microplastics in our bloodstream. The extinction in our bones. We can't unfeel what we know. We can't unknow what our bodies perceive. A sensitive nervous system is the Earth's feedback system.
And how deeply can I feel the plastic sense of comfort of dispelling feeling for numbing. With how though it may be comfortable, it can very well contribute to a well-intentioned destruction. The destruction of intense emotions calling me to desperately care for myself that I forget all others.
I so deeply hurt knowing so much yet feeling alone in my community in those pains. And how I could hurt so deeply in my relationship to her when I face the presence that I was wanting to be loved by someone struggling to love themself. And how I may have contributed to deeper hurt and wounding not seeing the chains of her hurt passed down through every action she took in misalignment from herself. How she stretched in so many ways to care for others and not giving that space to herself.
Though I am in immense weighing grief and how I am being stripped of all that is familiar, I found relief in Ailey Jolie's expressions of how healing can mean hurting:
Sensitive bodies feel the connection between all living things. Which often makes it impossible to be well in a world that's unwell.
... sensitivity isn’t a flaw, it’s intelligence. That your body knows which relationships are safe and which slowly poison you. That your exhaustion in toxic environments is wisdom, not weakness. That your climate anxiety is clarity. That your body’s refusal to adapt to violation, exploitation or violence is evolution trying to save itself.
Your nervous system isn't broken becuase it registers the breaking of the world
Reflecting on this, I felt so much heartache. This constriction in my chest that felt like these warping, twirling chains to circulation. Because I registered how our split could have contributed to such deep pain in her as I know how sensitivity she was to waking up with all that was under alarm within her. Only numbed and unlistened to because of the pressures and noise of academics.
I realize how I still am so sensitive to that. How I still want to support her during this time yet how I have also contributed to challenge within her life, asking her of things that have contributed to hurt in her.
Because the one thing I clocked from the beginning of when I met her is how she was sensitive. And how much I admired her even when she struggled to communicate with me while feeling the embarassment of exposing herself vulnerably. And I remember that so vividly of how I understood that we both longed to support others in deep ways and how that often drained us.
I mourn an orchestra of heartstrings. This funeral in my brain with how my memory of her has become this gravesite. This place in which even in my wonder of her, my understanding of her cannot truly be updated. How I cannot express how I could see how my sensitivity her turned into responsibility. With how that got in the way of seeing her fully. To respect her fully.
So, now in the space of the relationship, I realize how out of touch I had been with creating ritual, creating space for worship, and love for a life wider than simply a person. As I know how dedicated I am in rediscovering the healing that so longs to emerge. And how that often comes in balancing sensing, feeling, and thinking.