You ever have a period of your life where everything and nothing has happened? Like I feel busy and enchanted by wonder around me and so much has happened and yet were someone to ask me about these last few weeks… what would I say? That I saw a some fireflies and that one crazy streak of lightning last week?

It’s all very odd. And I guess that makes sense for internal mind shift stuff.

But speaking of lightning:

That forecast is actually from last week (or week before? Who even knows at this point). And it’s also raining right now.

I am not complaining, mind you. The springs in our local park are finally flowing again as the aquifer has been recharged enough to cause that for the first time in 3 years. My garden looks awesome and I am in perpetual need to mow the grass… but as everything else is growing well too I shall put up with it.

I had resolved, long ago, in the early after time, to listen to some nudge to go outside and stand in the rain in any storm that came through. For two years I have followed this nebulous direction. I have, very recently, been missing some storms, but I still go out in as many as I can. I did this morning while drinking coffee, in fact- that was a new one.

What does it mean? Hmmm… it’s a good question. I don’t really know. I guess I’d worry about getting those nudges and following them so blindly if I didn’t feel so fundamentally well protected and held by the Universe and spirit (lets get weird with it today, why the fuck not)- and also knowing I am able to trust my own discernment on stuff like this. Plus, I DO kinda know who’s on my team over there so it’s easier to trust these things, you know?

Anyway. I find it incredibly grounding, if that even is the word for it. If “grounding” is the stripping away, even momentarily, of all thought and connecting you to your bare feet planted on the ground and connecting you to nature and the sky and the planet around you and make you thankful to just exist and breath in this one particular moment… well then, brother, let’s call it ‘grounding”.

But that has been big work, right? Like in the early days those moments were the only flickers this life had for me that weren’t pain. Then they were the only flickers of life amidst a sea of numbness. And then the fire caught back on and I can sit now and stare into the flames and watch the campfire and even glance away sometimes and still have the glow of it all out of the corner of my eye.

I am back and settled in a happy life. Some-fucking-how.

Perhaps this is the thing I have struggled to sit down and write about.

There has been no light switch moment.

Nothing really changes, day by day.

And yet life is fundamentally different now for me.

How do you write that, without sounding crazy?

perhaps it’s some of all of this:

I have gone to the absolute fucking depths over these last few years. And what I have come back with from that depth…. is, mysteriously, my favorite version of me I have ever been. (Lacking in humility, this one, though. Tsk. You can’t have it all.)

Do you know the strength of surviving the very thing that should have killed you? The fucking confidence that has the power to send coursing through your veins? I was stripped bare by grief and I let it… and then I just went: the only way this works for me is to stay this vulnerable and tuned in and willing to look REAL fucking weird out here and say the things I want to say and do the things that I want to do and not be afraid… and something good will come of it, I just know it.

I have really, really tried and I may not always hit it right, but I do a majority of the time. And it has built up a life around me that I can like living in, again.

I do, in fact, have to write this grief book because for SURE I didn’t read anything about any of this shit being possible back there in the depths of it all. And yet, even in the dark depths of the ocean bottom of grief I started swimming for a surface I couldn’t see yet because I just wouldn’t (WOULDN’T) accept it wasn’t possible it wasn’t there. I feel VERY much like that little black angler fish at the surface of the water from a year or so ago.

Pretty apt analogy, honestly.

Anyway.

I guess what has been difficult is to type that out, especially here, where I have poured my grief onto a page and held it up to be witnessed. And I’ve also held this change kinda close because… maybe it’s just a phase? Do I write about all of this and then the next week go: “my bad, back to your regularly scheduled programming of despair?” But no. And look, this isn’t linear. Waves crash over, and my nervous system is still shot, and my memory sucks from the grief caused brain damage… but even in May it was better than the May before, and it curved back up again in June after.

And also I feared… well look, let me level with you on this. Having grown up with a mother who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and (in her words) “decided she wasn’t because she didn’t like the term”… did kinda watch myself and go… “alright, weirdo. Let’s just make sure this isn’t like, mania or something, shall we?” And so I did observe and discuss with my therapist (who shook her head and was like: you’re not fucking bipolar, numbnuts) and just went… huh. Turns out sometimes you’re allowed to be doing alright in the face of damn near impossible things and it doesn’t mean it’s a manic episode… ain’t that a relief!

I think it is, in fact, time to write about all of this, now.

And so a new mantra, after all the other ones over these past two years are retired and hung up in the rafters:

It’ll never be okay, but I will be alright.

I will take it.

And it isn’t over, the grief- I will carry the loss of Lucas for the rest of my life, as I should. But I also have integrated it all and carry him with me, here in the present. And the grief has morphed now as I do “miss” him physically existing… and yet also I do not “miss” him (in the “I am apart from him” way) as I still very much “have” him with me still, and yet… *gestures around* I am aware of the reality of the situation of THIS ALL, you know?

And so grief is so very, very different than what it has been these past two years. And the different it has morphed into has allowed for a life that has the capacity to be good, just in different ways than it was before. And I had to change everything about me to make all this happen… and yet that is okay too and somehow in spite of that I am the same person.

I am weirder and I like me better.

Maybe that captures it.

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And now, when I healed by being so open and public with my grief… I now struggle with re-establishing some concept of privacy that doesn’t feel like secrecy or hiding. And the expectation from others (#noty’all) is to have constant and full access to my life still. Like the people who help you in grief get used to the access to your life in a way that you need in the active healing stages, but once you are through that stage it feels like people taking from you or expecting too much from you.

That happened to me a couple of weeks ago and I really had to sit with it. I had gotten pulled too many directions at once and resented it and then had to sit with myself because the truth of it all (it ALL) is that people treat you the way you allow them to treat you… and so the access to me and my life is something I have to be the one in charge of adjusting. These are all people that helped me in my grief, of course, and I love them… and yet now, without it being a rejection, this is something I have had to start learning to navigate.

This too is very weird to adjust to.

ANYHOOO… so I’m good, how are you?

lol.

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I guess I’ll talk more about it, as this isn’t me saying I’ll never write any more of it here or anything, that isn’t what this is at all. Bt there have been a few things I kept close to the vest that I now have checked in with myself enough to go: no no, there is no obligation to share here… you don’t have to… you just have to want to. And I go… hmmm. Yes. Yes there is something to share because I want to.

And one of those things the womb steam from back in January.

Honestly- that you’re naked and squatting over a big steaming bowl of salt water (totally covered in a voluminous coverup mind you- I ain’t down for bare-naked group work)… was the least important part of all this. Also- can I say I HATE the term womb? The other term for this event is called a yoni-steam… and I like that even LESS… but alas you have to call them something. Anyway.

This too was a guided meditation after we all got settled in over the steam bowls. There was music being played, and you do the normal mental visualization prep of walking out into a field and centering before the mental journey begins, then you walk down a set of stairs…

and poof.

I am not in a room with other women over bowls of steam.

I am flat on my back, looking up into a dark sky with snow falling down on me.

it is one of the most stunningly beautiful things I have ever seen, and I just stare and stare and stare up into it, with an overwhelming feeling of peace washing over me.

Nothing changes but all of the sudden instead of looking up my perspective shifts and I am now looking down- back pressed against this big globe of a planet, and with the snow still falling at me as it was before… but I am looking down into it and the vastness of space behind it. I have no fear of falling, and yet… I am looking down.

And then the perspective shifts again and I am looking out. I am suspended sideways, like a painting hung on a wall and looking out into it now- not up at it or down at it but out into it… and they’re all correct. we live on a globe. This is how that works.

Through all of this the snow continues to fall beautifully and the sense of peace is all encompassing… and I am home. I feel suddenly at home on the planet again.

This crashes over me and into me and I go… I am home and I will NEVER not be home again. This then makes me realize… that is what this grief has been this whole time, I DIDN’T have a home anymore in grief. My home was Lucas and he was gone, so suddenly, that random Sunday morning. And I hadn’t had a home ever since.

I thought of the version of me I had been in grief… and I was suddenly so proud of her. I just went: oh Honey, god look how brave you were. Look how fucking brave that chick was, bumbling around down there so damn near mortally hurt and bereft and without a home and she was still trying, god bless her. She was still trying so very goddamn hard. And then just like the perspective shift on the planet from earlier… my perspective shifted and I went from: “oh the poor thing I’m proud of her” to it not being this other version… it was me.

And I was able to go: I am proud of me. All of those things I had just thought as if she was a different person, no no… I was able to think those now as of my own self. I was just SO overwhelmingly thankful. I was home. I had found home again and then centered it in myself and then knew KNEW that meant I could never lose that again, and I was proud of who I had been and how hard I had tried in my grief even without ever feeling like I had a soft place to land or a home to go back to. They could take it all from me again, every bit left in this life, and yet that part, that home… that one was mine forever now.

And I sat with that and had tears leaking from my eyes in the real world, while in the meditation/vision place I still was staring up and out into the snow falling…

And then I opened my physical eyes and sat up and it was over.

As I drove an hour towards home down many dark and empty Texas roads (the event had been far away from my town) the moon was bright and full above me and I listened to the Bends by Radiohead and the phrase “I wanna live, breathe, I wanna be part of the human race…” just kept ringing in my ears like a bell. I kept replaying the song.

I knew I was ready, but not sure for what. But I was home again, and whole again. I have sat with this feeling for a good long while now.

It was all very meaningful and magical and I have held it close to the vest ever since, just to make sure it was real. And yet here we are.

And so yeah.

That’s where I’m at- let me pull that curtain back for you a bit.

I will live, breathe, I will be part of the human race… and I will do it from here until I die… which I now sincerely hope is quite a long time from now, as I do want to stay here for a while. Life has the capacity to hold good things again.

Thank yall for coming with me through this all, you know? there will be more pain out there, I expect no constant rainbows and sunshine, but I do expect plenty of good here now too. Again.

Talk soon.