Dearest, neglected audience:
The sands of time have had quite the opportunity to work their way through the waist of the hourglass, though I suppose that's the way of things. A great many things have come to pass since we last turned the timer on its head, and while more than a few are worthy of mention, it's something more ethereal I shall attempt to share.
Often this time of year, emotions run away with us - with cabin fever, the cold, travel, money, family and love all raised to higher levels, its helpful to me to look for a little logic and a little language to take the whole of human experience and knock it down a peg; make it a little more digestible. For your curiosity, you'll find below my musings on loss for this winter.
So much of the past year and a half of my life can be measured in the direction, quality, and quantity of footprints. Most of them are mine, drying in a crisscrossed pattern of sweet corn mash and barley flour at Willie's Distillery in Ennis, or in the cold wet earth of my mother's garden in Seattle. Many of them are frozen in the top soil of Gravelly Range Road, next to cattle, cat and bear tracks, where I spent so much time watching storms as I ticked off the miles of training that brought me to the start and finish lines of my first marathon. Now, they're pressed into snow in Kirby and Jackson, Wyoming, Victor, Idaho, Butte, Montana, and again into the damp, fallen leaves here in Seattle.
As a kid, snow never lasted long enough to remind me of anything but the last time it snowed. These days, it's like creating sand castles that last all season. There I spilled my coffee, Frosty Buns the Snowman keeps the cottonwood company, the drift that's high enough to leave snow in your boots - but most perplexing of all are the boot prints, side by side, long after the person wearing them has gone.
I've likened death and loss to the feeling I have when furniture has been moved or taken to the dump: in the middle of the night, or with hands full of groceries, I reach for the table or sofa and experience a distinct falling feeling, not unlike when you miss a step. I've learned to accept these things as laws of physics that govern my emotional landscape, and sometimes the change is so much faster than my ability to process and accept the new world order. While the shifts themselves often feel the same, having such a literal reminder pressed into the snow is foreign and uncomfortable, but welcome somehow as validation that the step I keep missing, the table I'm reaching for, was there once. Perhaps somewhere in that validation there's comfort to be found.
The floors have been washed, the roads graded, and whether the snow lasts for an afternoon or all season, my feelings of loss, transition, gratitude, compassion, connection and love were as real at their inception as they feel transient and lost in memory. For the snow-pressed prints I really can't escape or cling to, I'm grateful for the tiny ways in which my past accompanies me, for somewhere in the proof of loss I feel less alone.
The sands of time have had quite the opportunity to work their way through the waist of the hourglass, though I suppose that's the way of things. A great many things have come to pass since we last turned the timer on its head, and while more than a few are worthy of mention, it's something more ethereal I shall attempt to share.
Often this time of year, emotions run away with us - with cabin fever, the cold, travel, money, family and love all raised to higher levels, its helpful to me to look for a little logic and a little language to take the whole of human experience and knock it down a peg; make it a little more digestible. For your curiosity, you'll find below my musings on loss for this winter.
So much of the past year and a half of my life can be measured in the direction, quality, and quantity of footprints. Most of them are mine, drying in a crisscrossed pattern of sweet corn mash and barley flour at Willie's Distillery in Ennis, or in the cold wet earth of my mother's garden in Seattle. Many of them are frozen in the top soil of Gravelly Range Road, next to cattle, cat and bear tracks, where I spent so much time watching storms as I ticked off the miles of training that brought me to the start and finish lines of my first marathon. Now, they're pressed into snow in Kirby and Jackson, Wyoming, Victor, Idaho, Butte, Montana, and again into the damp, fallen leaves here in Seattle.
As a kid, snow never lasted long enough to remind me of anything but the last time it snowed. These days, it's like creating sand castles that last all season. There I spilled my coffee, Frosty Buns the Snowman keeps the cottonwood company, the drift that's high enough to leave snow in your boots - but most perplexing of all are the boot prints, side by side, long after the person wearing them has gone.
I've likened death and loss to the feeling I have when furniture has been moved or taken to the dump: in the middle of the night, or with hands full of groceries, I reach for the table or sofa and experience a distinct falling feeling, not unlike when you miss a step. I've learned to accept these things as laws of physics that govern my emotional landscape, and sometimes the change is so much faster than my ability to process and accept the new world order. While the shifts themselves often feel the same, having such a literal reminder pressed into the snow is foreign and uncomfortable, but welcome somehow as validation that the step I keep missing, the table I'm reaching for, was there once. Perhaps somewhere in that validation there's comfort to be found.
The floors have been washed, the roads graded, and whether the snow lasts for an afternoon or all season, my feelings of loss, transition, gratitude, compassion, connection and love were as real at their inception as they feel transient and lost in memory. For the snow-pressed prints I really can't escape or cling to, I'm grateful for the tiny ways in which my past accompanies me, for somewhere in the proof of loss I feel less alone.
In closing, and hopefully to cement that while wistful I do intend this as a bittersweet positive letter, I'll leave you with a quote from one of my all-time favorite movies, I ❤ Huckabees.
When you get the blanket thing you can relax because everything you could ever want or be you already have and are. - Bernard Jaffe
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