My labour this long weekend was in my basil patch, surrounded by my most favourite aroma in the world harvesting glossy emerald leaves for pesto and fresh basil lemonade. In the moment there was glorious peace and flow of creation.
Just behind it, though, was the energy straining to move, that would not be denied despite my best efforts to avoid it. Back to school, back to work, back to autumn … such sadness it evokes, yet to be grieving, angry, hopeless on such an abundant day seems wrong. ‘Back to …’anything feels constricting, counterintuitive to me, to anyone knowing they were born to evolve, yet there is a sense of comfort, an image of safety, in returning to what was, even if only in the mind. An avoidance of loss, of danger of death.
And there it is. The pressure in my body, telling me it’s exactly the right time to pause, breathe, and dive straight in to how I hold death.
Labour Day weekend this year doesn’t just bring up my perennial grief at the end of a summer gone too soon. It also marks the 10th anniversary of our purchase of the cottage, a family play space with the ulterior motive of serving as a second address, heralding the slow dissolution of our marriage about to begin. It’s the first weekend of this ‘second address’ being mine, and an ongoing reminder that the card games and beach walks and rainy days spent building Lego are gone in a flurry of children evolving into young adults, with university and careers and their own relationships to play in. Who am I if I am not the mom with a houseful of kids, or even a house?
It’s also been a week of grieving other people’s children, sudden deaths of young adults in their 20s and 30s. There was a time when I would have felt the sadness just enough to fuel a prayer and condolences and a slight curiosity as to how these things happen. Now I find myself on a teeter totter of energy intense and active, on one side grief and fury that rages against a world claiming evolution yet killing our children before it is time, on the other the complete absence of feeling, numb and mutely watching all going on around me as a movie, not engaging, separate from it all.
It’s a choice point of separation that exists only in my mind, that my body says ‘no more.’
Who am I, and who do I become when I get off the teeter totter, the merry-go-round, out of the hellish playground altogether and own all that I feel, everything, nothing, and all in between, to drop the labels and live from what I know rather than what I ‘should’ do, or what is the norm?
I become someone comfortable with death as a part of life, life as a part of death, knowing that life, death and everything in between are labels for the experiences we as divine energy have in human bodies. I become someone who sees life and death becoming currency in the hands of those wanting our trust and our cash for their own selfish uses, terrifying us with stories to sell us products to defy aging, protect us from evil, or earn us a place in eternal life. We come from infinite energy into a human body for an experience on Earth, we return to infinite energy when time on Earth is done. Who would each of us become, what would our world become, if we owned and trusted that there is nothing to earn, no space to buy, no need to measure up, no fears to push down? All we have and all we need is breath, awareness, and the moment we are in to choose, create, and own our creation.
Death is all around us, when I choose to see it. My basil plants, harvested of their leaves, will die, their stalks and roots and the soil that sustained them composted back to the earth. My children will leave this Earth someday. For generations we have been taught how wrong it is, how devastating that children die before their parents. Absolutely it is. But at what age and what stage does loss of a loved one from Earth feel okay? My grandmother was 96 when she died; her death did not feel easy because ‘she lived a good long life’ and it was the ‘natural order of things.’ I miss her keenly, memories slicing like the edge of a knife, until I choose to open to another way to hold death. Not loss, but transition. Her essence returned to the infinity of the divine, still with me and a part of me, as energy rather than her voice and body tangible in front of me. So comforting, soothing as one of her crocheted blankets.
Who wouldn’t choose a blanket to curl up with rather than a knife? Or the scent of basil?
When I forget who I am, a divine signal able to create safety within myself, the only safety there is, I choose the knife, keeping the hurts fresh and the rage on standby. I tell myself stories and cling to memories for fear of allowing energy to move, light to shine, joy to enter, life to expand, for expansion brings me closer to my signal, myself, something I and generations before me was taught to hide, lest we behave dangerously, destroy something or be destroyed.
In the sunshine of awareness, grounded in the moment we’re in, the choice is clear.
Our power is in the moment, in ourselves, lived in the choices we make. I choose to allow the moments of sadness, the moments of fear, knowing that they cannot hurt me, and allowing them to move will free me. I choose to set down the knife and allow the world to shift, to change around me. To smell the basil and smile, not because it grew, but because of what I learn in the letting go.
Somehow you develop as a writer through even just a single blog post, revealing your strength and reflecting the beauty of life so easily and escalating the value of the post so effortlessly, or so it seems.
While you say you no longer have a “house” of your own, house is a relative term we have come to very easily decide as an image of many rooms filled with people and chaos. You may no longer have that, instead you have a home to call and create your own. A home, as you define it, is much more valuable. Cherish that, along with your breath and presence.
And thank you, for uprooting the dirt to blossom as doing so help so many realize they can find their light, too.