the empty space

from the pages of my journal ~ august 15, 2019

yesterday evening was the most difficult so far. beginning the dismantling of the life my parents built. going through their things felt intrinsically painful. i cried the entire time. i was all alone and there was a thunderstorm raging outside, so it was poetically dark with jags of lightning and crashing booms. very dramatic, very final. i kept taking emotional breaks to sit and rock in my dad’s chair.

the people who placed the items in the drawers, scribbled the notes, created the artwork, constructed the rooms, made the memories . . . are just GONE. there’s a whisper of each of them in the rooms, which i can’t quite grasp. i can’t adequately explain the feeling either, like nothing else i’ve ever experienced.

but i’m left feeling rather displaced. i still don’t really belong in italy (perhaps never will), but i’ve always had this place to call “home.” now no longer.
 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 
from the pages of my journal ~ august 17, 2019

i hit a wall last night. after I got back from the CMG overnighter at connie’s lake cabin, i took a two-hour nap. and when i woke up, i just felt TOTALLY EXHAUSTED . . . physically, mentally, emotionally. just so completely out of it, and kind of numb. it’s hard to describe, but EVERYTHING just sounds sooooooo t-i-r-i-n-g . . . even thinking about the flight back, future events, everything. i just want to sleep. all the time. and then i don’t sleep. waking up a lot, wild dreams, etc.

and i’m not sure how many more times i can fall without breaking a bone! i just fell down our concrete steps and landed in a heap on both knees!! my left wrist is hurting a lot, my knees and one ankle are scraped up and bruised. my poor knees (i just did the same thing, on concrete, in december). it kind of tweaked my back a bit as well. just didn’t need this right now. (i think that’s why it happened though – totally not paying attention.) i am so incredibly sore. and i have zero energy left.

i’m all booked up with social stuff too. every single day until i leave is planned out . . . picnics and lunches and coffee dates. the farmer’s market in coeur d’alene, a concert in the local park. several dinners. and also errands i need to do. i LOVE that, but it feels like i have to put forth much more of an effort than i usually do. and it seems as if i’m two different people – one laughing and talking, and the other silently watching the laughing talking one. a strange experience. i do like having all of these incredibly loving supportive people around though. and i know part of me is realizing i’m going to be leaving that soon.

i just couldn’t make myself go over to dad’s house at first (even though several people offered to go with me, to help). the thought that i might never see that house and that property again after next week feels so remarkably crushing.

i’m just not excited about anything. i certainly don’t feel like i belong in kellogg. however, life is obviously much easier here. i am able to talk freely and be understood. i miss eric (and my cats/my house/my friends), but everything is harder to navigate in italy. and right now that sounds extremely tiring to me. torn and confused over several things that have happened in the past few weeks, with no idea how to resolve this mix of conflicting emotions i’m feeling. yet at the moment i’m not feeling any sadness or anger or anguish. just NOTHING. numbness.
 
 

 
 
from the pages of my journal ~ september 25, 2019

slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y . . . i’m finding my way back to my life. fighting a sinus infection (nothing new) and unexplained tummy troubles (the way my body usually deals with stress), but once again up to 20+ minutes a day of qigong (so relaxing/restoring/rejuvenating) and healthy eating (today’s lunch a cannellini smash – SOOOOOOO yummy). i’ve only left the house a handful of times since my return to italy. but this hibernation period feels right to me, what i clearly need at the moment. i continue to work steadily on my art therapy course, my qigong teacher training, my italian lessons. i’ve enjoyed revisiting my many fabulous memories of my parents and childhood, and sharing them on both my blog and social media. i’ve been overwhelmed by (and immensely grateful for) the outpouring of love and support i’ve received from friends and acquaintances all over the world. every day someone’s kind words bring me to tears (in a good way, a healing way). i still feel fragile, but i feel centered too. sad, yet tentatively hopeful.
 
 

 
 
“Stillness is the rhythm where we learn about stopping and pausing. We slow down, gather our energy inward and come home to be with ourselves. We focus our attention on the ebb and flow of our breath, the beat of our heart and the pulsing of our cells. We learn to explore the silence within and without. Sometimes in this work we mistake collapsing for becoming still. Stillness is a very alive, alert energy field. The shadow side of stillness is numbness.”

~Gabrielle Roth
 
 
“We need to be alive to the times when we are waning as well as waxing and not be unkind to ourselves. Resting is integral to rhythm. It is as integral to being human as work and creativity. Adding space and pauses into our rhythm is about how we give meaning to our lives. How we craft the empty space is vital to the story we want to live.”

~Jan Fortune
 
 
“Thirty spokes unite at the single hub;
it is the empty space that makes the wheel function.
Fashion clay to form a bowl;
It is the empty space that makes the bowl useful.
Cut out a window and doors;
it is the empty space that makes the room practical.
So gain comes from what is there;
benefit from what is not there.”

~Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11
 
 
“Embrace the pause. Pauses restore your directed attention, calm your nervous system and equalize your emotions.”

~Wade Brill
 
 
“The power of pause . . . Our bodies are magnificent, brilliant, stabilizing systems when we give our body and our mind the opportunity to balance and align.”

~Cara Bradley
 
 
“Anyone who is going through deep grief can tell you that it affects your heart, your mind – and your body. Every moment we are making choices – whether to move toward healing or to stay stuck in pain. Healing requires movement. Because your body remembers the pain.”

~David Kessler
 
 
“It’s the first day of fall—a perfect time for crisp walks and warm drinks, and a mindful reminder that change is a natural part of life. Here are three ways to slow down and savour the season:
1. Focus on one thing at a time.
2. Nourish your body.
3. Shift your perspective.”

~Heather Hurlock
 
 
“You might recall what it’s like to be with someone who has grieved deeply. The person has no layer of protection, nothing left to defend. In the groundless openness of sorrow, there is a wholeness of presence and a deep natural wisdom.”

~David Ison, on the Lakota-Sioux tradition
 
 
“DESPAIR
takes us in when we have nowhere else to go; when we feel the heart cannot break anymore, when our world or our loved ones disappear.

Despair is a haven with its own temporary form of beauty and of self-compassion, it is the invitation we accept when we want to remove ourselves from hurt. Despair is a last protection. To disappear through despair, is to seek a temporary but necessary illusion.

Despair is a necessary and seasonal state of repair, a temporary healing absence, an internal physiological and psychological winter when our previous forms of participation in the world take a rest; it is a loss of horizon. Despair is the time in which we both endure and heal, even when we have not yet found the new form of hope.

Despair turns to depression and abstraction when we try to make it stay beyond its appointed season and start to shape our identity around its frozen disappointments.

Despair needs a certain tending, a reinforcing, and isolation, but the body left to itself will breathe, the ears will hear the first birdsong of morning or catch the leaves being touched by the wind in the trees, and the wind will blow away even the grayest cloud; will move even the most immovable season; the heart will continue to beat and the world, we realize, will never stop or go away.

The antidote to despair is not to be found in the brave attempt to cheer ourselves up with happy abstracts, but in paying a profound and courageous attention to the body and the breath, independent of our imprisoning thoughts and stories, even strangely, in paying attention to despair itself, and the way we hold it.

We take the first steps out of despair by taking on its full weight and coming fully to ground in our wish not to be here. We let our bodies and we let our world breathe again. In that place, strangely, despair cannot do anything but change into something else, into some other season, as it was meant to do, from the beginning. Despair is a difficult, beautiful necessary, a binding understanding between human beings caught in a fierce and difficult world where half of our experience is mediated by loss, but it is a season, a wave form passing through the body, not a prison surrounding us. A season left to itself will always move, however slowly, under its own patience, power and volition.”

~David Whyte
 
 

 
 
all of these lovely words speak to me. i’ve needed the stillness and the waning, the empty space and the pause. nourishing, savoring, a singular focus. even with no layer of protection, the seasonal state of despair has needed to occur for me. i’m still entrenched in this season, but things are starting to shift, beginning to move.

as they always do.

perhaps today my thoughts and some of the thoughts i’ve shared (most of which are excerpts from longer passages that you really must seek out and devour) address a particular need in you as well.

take good care.
 
 
 
 

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