How it’s mid-August already is beyond me. How has your summer been? If you haven’t yet I hope you take these last precious weeks and dip a toe in the water, take a picnic to the beach at sunset, grill up burgers and make a toppings bar with all the best stuff. Eat a waffle cone with two kinds of ice cream. I hope you read a fun fiction novel and sleep in late one day. I hope you see some shooting stars, or maybe just sit quietly under the immense canopy of nighttime.
We moved at the end of June to the sweetest little guest house at our friend’s farm. It’s been a summer of kids and dogs and fitting into small, beautiful spaces that aren’t my own. A summer of Steve working two different lines of work; one foot still in the world of construction and the other finding its way back to the transmission rebuilding of his youth. The circular quality of life, the ways in which we find ourselves back into what we thought we’d left behind. Finding what we left quite different than how we remembered it.
September comes creeping up before us and feels like a door to me, a passageway. The true ‘new year’, not the popular one touted in the dead of winter, but the one that unfolds as kids get back into school, as the blistering heat leaves as quickly as it came. The days are crisper, fresher. It feels like a time of possibility. Magic hidden under piles of dry leaves.
I left off in May having shared our unfolding saga and I can’t say yet what our next step is. It’s all the same hopes, of roots being cast deep into the earth, of a house becoming our home, of a reclamation of ourselves, our dreams and desires. But there does feel like a shift is happening. I feel it right now, sitting outside watching my dogs who are blessedly romping in the protected grassy yard, watching the barn swallows dip over the aqua pool. This scorching hot day kissed every so often with a breeze. And that breeze feels like change to me, it feels like I’ve opened the door to a hot and musty cavernous dwelling that was my heart, that the fresh air is coming in to blow the grist of the past clear out and lighten it all.
I realized how much I’ve engaged with my own dialogue of “trying to get back on top of things”, I’ve clung desperately at times to the notion of rebuilding what has crumbled in my life these past few years. Both mine and Steve’s businesses, my friendships, my outlets, our income, our home base. I’ve really attached to this version of what was and trying to regain it and suddenly, miraculously, it just feels obvious that it’s not mine to rebuild.
It’s mine to let go of.
I’ve always considered myself a future dweller, tied to what will come, how I’ll achieve all these big dreams and desires I have. I’ve never felt I was one to dwell on the past, to obsess or agonize over situations that could have gone differently. But suddenly I see how actually I have kept myself too tightly entwined with what has been, who I have been, and I’ve measured that against what is possible for me now.
Now I see that I don’t have to repeat all those same patterns, I don’t have to keep not making new friends while I grieve the ones I’ve lost, I don’t have to say no to a house, a job, an opportunity just because it’s not what I would have done before.
There’s so much peace in this. I’ve been seeing myself as someone steadily climbing the mountain, the steep arduous path is slippery with loose rocks and as I traverse it I’m carrying this heavy load. All my mistakes, my blunders, my missed opportunities, my losses, so heavy. And I kept thinking I just had to trudge ever onward, up to the pinnacle and then, from my new lofty perspective, see how to go with ease towards what’s next.
The pinnacle sits always on the horizon, it never comes closer. All along the way I slip again and right myself again, all along the way my load becomes heavier.
A coolness has just lifted in the breeze as I write this —
Over the past few months I feel I’ve sat with this burden, I’ve opened it up, I’ve examined it. I’ve become vulnerable with people who love me and shared how scary and tumultuous this has been. I’ve let myself feel feelings I normally brush away, so tied to being stoic and steady.
All of this heaviness, this having to ‘figure it out’, to get back to where we once were, it’s exhausting. And it leaves so little room for just enjoying life - when you’re constantly fighting to fix it all, it feels somehow that you shouldn’t find pleasure in it, you should be so focused on ‘the work’. Life is so staggeringly beautiful! When I started to see how much misery I was forcing myself to endure; how I kept pushing off the time for enjoyment to later, when we have the house, the money, we’ve paid off the debt, etc. What a waste.
For a long time I’ve been focused on what’s being ‘taken away’ from me, what’s being removed from my life. I’ve been resistant to it, clutching at it, trying to keep it all in my grasp. I think I’m ready to let it collapse.
Maybe I don’t actually know what’s best for me in this season. I’ve held fast to all I’ve thought was meant for me even as it’s been radically removed. I’ve thought, if I can just try harder, want it more, give more of myself to it, it will come. But it hasn’t. And in the wake of it all leaving is the detritus of my attachment to it all.
None of it feels particularly streamlined, or like it makes much sense. It’s certainly not without a lot of trepidation. Someone said to me recently that worrying is worshipping the problem, oof. That’s an alter I don’t want to spend time at, do you?
Fearing what will happen, how we’ll recover financially, what my kids will think of this nomadic phase of their lives. All of that keeps me from being here, with what is.
I might never open my porch side café or publish my book or speak on a stage again. I might not create another successful business or renovate my sprawling wilderness waterfront home. Would that need to mean anything?
Ok so, I am disillusioned, I won't lie. I have felt let down too many times in a row to keep pulling myself up by my bootstraps right now. AND I also don’t feel mired down by any of it. It’s a lightness I’m experiencing in the letting go. It’s not something that’s happening to me, it’s something I’m choosing. It’s a shift from victimhood to acceptance.
It doesn’t feel like giving up, it feels like giving in. Of just saying, ok this is how this one goes and I won’t fight it.
There are a lot of changes coming up — still house hunting, getting our girls back into the school we left in 2020, this shift Steve is making from contractor to mechanic. There are a lot of big decisions to be made, a lot of broken things to be mended and obstacles to be overcome. Can I approach it with levity of spirit? With curiosity and openness?
I feel a buoyancy, a sense of peace, like I’ve been lifted on the breeze and my newly unburdened shape is being carried. I watch as monarch and yellow butterflies alight over the garden, see how they catch this breeze and move along with it, soaring higher. My own heart feels that way, lifted. With this new vantage point I don’t see the mountain. I see a long rambling path, with twists and turns, dark forested parts where hardly any light gets in and vibrant streams where the dappled sunshine reflects back brilliantly. So many peaks and valleys, places to shelter in a storm, places where you have to tread carefully. Just life in all its seasons and phases, still opening up to us and allowing us to always - always - choose to meet the unknown with a grateful, joyful heart.