It was very kind of her to recognize the anti-climax and emptiness I was feeling, and to offer me a way to deal with it. I accepted, not knowing what she had in mind, but trusting in the intent. It was a night after work, so we planned for 7 pm. I got home and decided to bake some chocolate chip cookies as thank you offering. Or rather, a cooky: the toaster oven doesn't really accommodate cookies, so I put the whole batch in a pie plate. It doesn't cook evenly, so the bottom was burned. But you can't really go wrong with butter, chocolate, pine nuts, and brown sugar, right?
M's house is a lovely adobe, with a fireplace and wood floors. We sat in the living room, on a two-person couch, facing the western windows into the garden. She had a tri-fold votive screen, which held 12 votive candles, and it was on a table about 5 feet away from us. We each had a glass of water, and a box of kleenex nearby.
She started with a short meditation: close your eyes, think of a joy, focus on that sensation. I can't remember what joy I thought of: friendship? snorkeling? waking by the ocean? chocolate chip cooky? but it was actually hard to choose and focus on it, which was a nice revelation.
Then we opened our eyes and thought of an ending or a loss that we wanted to honor. We took turns, speaking of the event or the thought or the person, and then going to light a candle. Speak, rise, strike the match, light the candle, sit back down. In my case, grab a kleenex. When the candles were all lit, we blew them out, and those endings were sent upward with the smoke. We continued to speak more thoughts, light more candles. We talked about joyful losses: loss of weight, loss of anger, loss of unreasonable expectations. We talked about grief: loss of husband, loss of father, loss of self, loss of home. We talked about endings: end of a job, of a lifestyle, of youth, of middle age. All of which leads to beginnings.
She usually does this ritual during the dark of the moon, to help honor the past time and look forward to the new beginnings. I was reminded of the solstice celebration at T's, 2 years ago back in Portland. There, we started in darkness and lit each others candles and spoke a word for winter. The growing light and the sense of community were equally palpable. This was a more intimate ritual, with just the two of us, and it went deeper in a way. It began the process of letting go. I have been talking about losses in this blog, but I haven't been letting them go. I've been stuck in the grieving process.
Today, I came right up against the perils of being stuck. I have feared that I didn't have the wherewithal to find myself again, and I have feared losing my friends in the process. I have feared that I am not worth the time or the stress, that the more I reached out, the more I would drive away the help. And that is coming to pass.
It's probably a good thing to realize, viscerally, that the healing has to come from myself, and that others can do little to help. You can't replace 30 years of connection in a few months, and while those distant connections are real and deep and strong, they can't be there for you every day, or even every week. And neither can the new connections. Their support is of a different nature, and the trust and depth are embryonic, maybe stillborn. For the daily bread, I have to grow my own yeast, bake my own loaves. I have to do it alone.
And crying is bad for my sinuses.
Yesterday I walked in the hills with a new friend. We talked, we were silent. I touched the amazing rocks, I sniffed the piny juniper and the spicy woody willows, I watched the white fluffy clouds in the brilliant blue sky, I listened to the wind in the junipers, with the deep silence behind the sound. As ee cummings said, "how could tasting, touching, seeing, hearing, breathing, any -lifted from the no of all nothing- human merely being, doubt unimaginable You." I spread my arms to the soft cool breeze, I was full of joy, full of the moment. And that is as real as my grief and my tears.
I just wish I experienced it more often.
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| To honor Easter I resurrected two joys: Hiking and Thai food. |
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