Life Renewed …

I’ve been attempting to write this piece for two weeks.

Trying on different metaphors, from the ocean to the weather to my dreams, trying to make sense of something that simply can’t be made sense of.

I try and it feels robotic, the metaphors are lame, it sounds preachy.

And so I’ve learned to sit, and wait and let it work me, let it simmer and bubble and boil and get messy, until …

Until something, some little nugget, eventually finds it’s way through.

And sometimes that something appears as a sixty-seven year old woman sitting next to you at a bed and breakfast. The same bed and breakfast you labored over booking, because most rooms in this part of the world cost more than a month’s grocery budget, and you question whether or not you should or need to make the journey by yourself, and you consider all the others in your life’s needs and wants, and you wonder about the money, and your nerves of going by yourself almost stop you.

But sometimes, that all seems to come together just so, and you sit down one morning, a beautiful blue sky morning, at a table by yourself, which so rarely happens in your world, next to another woman by herself, and you start by simply looking up at each other and smiling and saying something about the weather. And then you turn back to your tables, but oddly your attention keeps being pulled back together, and you make short comments about where you are from and why you are here and you talk about prairie winters and the book she is reading and then you ask about her sling and she’ll tell you she fell off her horse, and then she’ll show you a picture of Zephyr and tell you about all the other women at the stable, and as she stands up to go and you put your hand to your heart to delight in this older woman following her passion after years of being a mother and a wife and a full time employee, she’ll pause and quietly say, well that’s not the whole story.

And then, with tears in her eyes, she’ll tell you that her husband died in January. And he had always encouraged her to ride again, and how she never did … well because of kids and a job and a marriage and then he got sick, and so when he died, she found herself going to the stable every day, and then she bought Zephyr and oh does she light up when she talks of Zephyr. And she shares that she had, she has all of these feelings … joy and grief and she didn’t know how to feel about experiencing so much joy when there was so much grief, and how she knew her husband would want her to be out riding, that she’s coming to realize, that you really can’t have one without the other, that joy and sorrow don’t exist separately, they can’t be teased apart.

What I’m trying to say with this is that my heart bursts and breaks, daily. Sometimes I don’t know what to make of it all, of this, of us, and mostly I don’t know how to write about it.

A security guard standing outside of a McDonalds monitoring the people without homes scattered all over the street, while a Dad and his two sons come out laughing, holding ice cream cones.

A baker with a tiny hidden bakery in an old trailer who only accepts cash tells me to pay him later when my wide eyes tell the tale of my cash-less situation. “If we can’t trust each other, what else do we’ve got?” he asks. Later, I drive past the make-shift shelter for folks without housing, and witness life in a parking lot, on the sidewalk, while real estate posters advertise houses with seven-figure price tags.

A pound of organic butter that costs more than the hourly minimum wage.

And then this …

Boxes in playgrounds for needles, strangers hiding little boxes of treasure for other strangers to seek and find, a meal shared with a neighbour whose life story hurts to hear, as he looks the girls in the eyes and says, “don’t you ever stop being kind.” And a few days later, him returning the gesture with a bowl of potato salad that took him three days to make.

A dear friend whose seen and felt life’s sorrows over the last few years texts that she is on a life-giving, heart-filling journey in Europe, and I smile so big, only minutes later receiving the news that another, a young father of three, had his heart beat it’s last, and what now? Another journey, just beginning.

Searching for tiny rock crabs on the beach, and the glee of a stranger’s lame-joke about not being too crabby, a concerned human watching out that the police don’t harm another sweet human, so he and I both paused for a few minutes, watching closely out the window, before we wish each other a good day and disappear from each other’s lives forever. A chat with three older ladies at least double my age and then some, about the style class I’m taking with my daughter and the revelation of asking yourself “how do I want to feel?” when you get dressed in the morning, “not what should I wear?”

RSVP’ing to a wedding and donating to a fundraiser for a tiny little kiddo with cancer, all in the same internet scroll.

Listening to the news and everything is a crises.

A housing crises. A climate crisis. An education crises. An immigration crises. A food-price crises. Mid-life crises. Humanitarian crises. Economic crises.

Is this how it is?
Is this how it's always been?
To exist in the face of suffering 
and somehow keep singing... 
- Free, Florence & The Machine

There is a word in Japanese, HIKIKOMOGOMO, 悲喜交々, that means, “having alternating feelings of joy and sorrow in your heart … tasting the bittersweetness of life.”

The bright, the beautiful, the bewildering.

Pain. Ache.

Delight.

Beauty.

The calm. The storm.

Grief. Joy.

It’s a practice for me not to settle in fear. To allow, accept, open to the changing weather, the crises, the darkness within, without.

To keep showing up, to breathe, to stay when it all feels like too much, to somehow even sing in the unknown mystery of it all, to remember that “just because I’m not feeling good, doesn’t mean I’m not doing good, just because it doesn’t feel good, doesn’t mean it isn’t for you.”¹

Walking home a few nights ago, late at night, new moon, no street lights, it’s dark, really dark. Instinctively walking in the middle of the road to give ourselves at least a second or two of time if something were to jump out of the trees, we tilt our measly cell phone flashlight up to the sky, and are shocked to see thousands and thousands of floating particles in the air. Pollen, we ascertained, after ruling out bugs.

Invisible to the eye, but nonetheless there.

“And to think, I am breathing that in all the time, without knowing it,” Ava sort-of grossed out, sort-of in awe, whispers, “what else is there in this darkness that I can’t see?”

"When we see only darkness, when we feel nothing but fear, we must dip into the darkness to become more human, more aware of the hidden light that is only found by going in ... it's here you will find what makes life meaningful.  It is here you learn to carry the tension between wonder and despair, beauty and loss." - Michael Meade -

Martin Prechtel says that in village life, the people didn’t wait for a crises, a storm, darkness to come. They made them. Their life, their spirituality, their community was based not on permanence, on expecting things to be smooth all the time, but on the constant maintenance and renewal of life, by making space for the hard, the dark, together.

 If it doesn’t fall apart, then there will be no reason to renew it. And it is this renewability that makes something valuable ... Mayans don’t wait for a crisis to occur; they make a crisis. Their spirituality is based on choreographed disasters -- otherwise known as rituals -- in which everyone has to work together to remake each other’s houses, or the community, or the world. 
Everything has to be maintained, because it was originally made so delicately that it eventually falls apart. 
It is the putting back together again, the renewing, that ultimately makes something strong.

We don't force the world to be what we want it to be, we make friends with, we belong to life.
- Martin Prechtel

So delicately made that it, that we, eventually falls apart…

Could it be that we are simply in the constant stages of crises, of darkness, because that is where life renews itself? It is here where we find ourselves, where we find and need each other? Where we learn to see in the dark?

A few days ago, I learned about nurse trees.

Huge fallen or dead logs that, whose slow rotting and decomposition becomes a site of regeneration and new life for not only new seedling trees, but also for fungi, insects, birds and other forest creatures. Although no longer “actively living,” the nurse tree, which itself began centuries ago on another fallen tree, shelters, nurtures and supports Life all around it, until they essentially become One with each other, and all the other trees before that.

She stood to leave, neither of us really wanting to end our conversation, as another woman suddenly interrupted us.

“What happened to your arm?” she asked forcefully, a nurse concerned with the haphazard way her sling was tied.

Just when I thought that we were going to have to repeat our whole conversation to this nosey newcomer, her face lit up with the mention of the word horse.

“Oh, I just bought a new helmet,” almost breathlessly the interrupter sighed, “I used to ride forty years ago, before I had kids, and a job and a husband, you know …” she sighed sadly, as she told us about her riding days, “and now, somehow I’m now sixty four years old.”

Turns out these two women are from the same city. More than a thousand kilometers and a ferry ride away.

“Oh, have I ever got a barn and a community for you,” the first woman, whose name of course I didn’t catch, breathed, still a tear in her eye.

Again and again. The cycle continues.

So delicately made.

Through darkness, Life, renewed.

A nurse tree.