On Moving through This Particular Time and Space

By Catherine DiMercurio

These past several months I have felt as if keeping my head above water takes most of my energy. Each moving-related milestone felt less like a hurdle overcome and more like a wave crashing down on me, until it is over, and I can float a little, catch my breath a little, until the next wave hits. In the midst of all the painting I was doing this past week at the new house, I was fighting to do just that, catch my breath. The task felt overwhelming, the number of walls, the trim to either paint or tape off, the cutting in, the multiple coats, the clean-up, the way the plaster was so thirsty and gulped up all the paint, the cove ceilings and their delicate curves, the yucky and ancient vinyl floorboard molding in the kitchen, the ruined window frame in the living room.

It’s been over a year since I got it in my head that I was going to move. I took my time with the process, knowing how much I loathe how urgency makes me feel. Winter and early spring were focused on clearing out the basement and making plans, and then in April and May I began to ramp things up with house repairs. Then things really sped up in June when I listed my house for sale and began searching for a new home in earnest. Now, I’ve closed on both houses. I spent a long weekend at the new house organizing some initial improvements—tearing out carpet and having a fence built—and cleaning. This past week, I went back to paint. It’s a task I always enjoy in the beginning, but by the end, I’m ready to be done. And this time the end didn’t come until the fourth room was painted on the fourth day. It was a big job, and like any home improvement task, it came with unexpected obstacles.

But, this isn’t going to be a boring home improvement post. I thought I wanted it to be about how good it felt to let this new-to-me but old house breathe and feel cared for again after a couple of years of vacancy. I thought I wanted to write about how I was trying to make this random place feel like my home. And I thought it was going to be about what a long, sometimes scary journey it has been.

Yet what is hitting me most right now, as a sit in my cozy current home now that I’ve returned from the painting week, is how confusing and chaotic prolonged transitions feel. Many people are in the midst of them now, with grown children off on new adventures or otherwise finding their footing in adult life. People are ending relationships, or starting them, or moving, or grieving, or changing jobs. Sometimes we go through big changes with others and sometimes we go through them alone. And we might have folks helping out where they can, but when we’re flying solo, the upheaval of big changes can hit especially hard.

Somewhere between wrapping up the painting of the bedroom and the office and the hallway and beginning the painting of the kitchen, I felt particularly wrung out and empty, and then I sort of remembered why I was where I was. Two miles west of me was one of the best stress-busters I’ve ever known: Lake Michigan. So that morning I made my coffee and loaded Zero in the car, and we drove the short five minutes to the lake to see the morning light play on the waves. We just stayed in the car, because we see off leash dogs all the time and that is not a great thing with a reactive dog whose training got derailed. I wanted this to be a moment of calm, so we stayed cozy, and watched the other early morning people go by, or do the same thing we were doing, viewing the lake from our cars as if we were at a drive-in theater. I’m looking forward to when I’m actually living at the new place, and I can go grab moments of lake-calm for myself whenever I need to. In this particular moment, I marveled at the way the light of the morning could be both bright and soft at the same time, and the way a gull sounds different when it’s swooping around the shoreline than a gull sounds in the old Kmart parking lot in the puddle of my childhood memories.

That moment was also a reminder to seek out calm wherever I am, lake or not. Because life can feel so big and so chaotic, whether or not we’re in periods of momentous transition. It’s not as if I forgot that I need to do that, or like I wasn’t trying all along to manage my stress with yoga and walks and early morning coffee in the yard with Zero and chats with family or friends. But sometimes we tell ourselves there’s no time, or that it won’t help anyway because there’s too much to do or our feelings of overwhelm are too great.

We tell ourselves a lot of things when we’re tired or drowning in all there is to do every day. We tell ourselves there’s not enough time to sit quietly in a safe place and catch our breath. Maybe we even tell ourselves there are no safe places, and it is tragic when that is true. But sometimes we’re still learning to be our own safe place and that takes time and practice. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we miss things that weren’t particularly good for us. Sometimes there were good parts to miss, but that doesn’t change things. We might ask ourselves why we ever thought we could handle the enormity of moving farther away than we’ve moved before and then we remind ourselves that we are, in fact, handling it. We’re almost there. We’re almost home.

And still, that doesn’t erase the hard parts. Holding two opposing truths within us at the same time can cause a bit of inevitable heartache. For reasons of financial and mental health, I need to go. To follow the dream of living near the lake, I need to go. Because I want to love where I live, I need to go, and at the same time, the fact that I’ll be almost three hours from my kids instead of half an hour hurts like hell. I haven’t made peace with that. I don’t know how to. And I guess, I don’t really want to make peace with it. I want that angst to keep motivating me to find ways to make it easier for us to see each other. I don’t want to slip in to “but it’s so far and everyone is so busy.” I want to remain highly motivated to find someone who can watch my sweet but challenging pup so I can take off for a long drive and a short visit, or to take a weekend here and there to see friends and family. People figure this stuff out all the time and I will too. It’s just, in moments of high contrast, the difficult parts feel sharper. Having just had time to hang out with my kids, the prospect of missing them is looming large.

It’s as if we have to keep finding ways to be bigger on the inside than we are on the outside, so we can hold all that life seems to ask us to hold. And sometimes there is no more room, and we have to become willing and able to put something else down so we can hold on to what we want to hold on to. Maybe there are old griefs I can leave behind so that there’s space to manage this new challenge of geography and proximity to the people I love. Maybe the perplexing problems I have for so long felt gnawing at me are less about algebra (as in, how do I solve for all these variables) and more about physics (as in, this is about the realities of force, mass, and acceleration, as in, how can I move myself forward through this particular time and space). Maybe the math analogy is bad but what I’m saying is that maybe it’s time to get practical instead of theoretical.

We’re all moving—together and separately—through this particular time and space and I hope we all find ways to allow ourselves to lean on one another and to be strong when we can’t and to be strong when someone else needs to lean on us.

Love, Cath

On Synthesis and Momentum and Messiness

By Catherine DiMercurio

I’ve been single two years to the day. Since the breakup that started this chapter of my life, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring my history and finding patterns and doing long-delayed work. I’ve focused on writing and pottery and self. I’ve mourned old things that it was too hard to fully manage before and I’ve mourned new things and I’ve found unexpected joys in solitude. Despite the periodic bouts of loneliness there’s a lot that simply feels better now. I have worked at discovering what wounds have followed me from childhood and into all of my adult relationships, and have explored many different ways of tending to such things. I’ve found ways to provide for myself things that were missing in a lot of relationships, like emotional safety and respect.

Still, there’s a part of my brain that seems exclusively devoted to tallies. It counts and categorizes the things that have hurt me and the things that helped me to grow. It tells me to keep writing and throwing clay and wandering in the woods. It reminds me of how good it feels to be near a lake and suggests we don’t forget about the plan to move closer to one. It encourages growth and development, but in the ways least likely to cause me pain. It’s very practical, this part.

There’s another part of my brain that unfurls itself like a flag in the wind, singing to me about being in love, and don’t I remember what that’s like, and don’t we want that again? The other part of my brain taps a pen against its clipboard and says something like, “according to the data, this course of action would not be a wise investment of resources. . . .”

They are at odds, and so am I. So for now, I check in with them to see how we’re feeling but stay busy with all the other things. Busy is an easy way to be, between a full-time job, pursuing writing as a serious endeavor, and pottery as art and hobby, maintaining my house and yard, caring for my dog, and trying to exercise and eat well and sleep well, and to generally stay healthy. That all gobbles up a lot of available energy.

At the same time, after my older dog died a few weeks ago, I spent a lot of time just sitting in the sun and watching the irises bloom. Sometimes everything needs to pause. It’s been nearly a month somehow and I’ve been trying to regain my footing. I feel as if I’ve been moving slowly and carefully through the world these last couple of weeks, trying to make sure nothing else breaks.

All this is to say that you get to a certain point and you get to feel very self-protective. I used to feel braver, at least when it came to putting my heart on the line. My loneliness outweighed everything else and it felt like I’d already been through a pretty rough heartbreak, and nothing could be worse than that, so I kept throwing my hat into the ring. But it doesn’t work the way I thought it did. A breakup after a two-year relationship can hurt just as badly as a breakup after a two-decade relationship. They just hurt differently. Hearts seem to have a lot more surface area than you’d expect and can break in a lot of places. And you keep mending it until you have this beautiful piece of art, mended with the gold of all your best efforts at healing, but you tend to get more careful with it. Mended, it’s strong, maybe even stronger than it was in the beginning, but you’re less likely to want to test out that theory.

I think this is why so many people turn to art. It can still break your heart in mighty ways, but they are easier to bounce back from. Art—specifically, my writing—has saved me and picked me back up time and time again. The physical act of it. My pursuit of it, following through with a low-residency MFA program in the middle of a divorce. The people I met, and the community I found. And I swear when I started pottery it was just like falling in love, full of angst and euphoria, and settling into the beautiful harmony between exhilaration and calm. And now there are so many different ways to grow and explore, it can feel overwhelming at times and at other times, I find so much relief in the knowledge that I could study and practice for a thousand years, or at least, the rest of my life, and still have more to learn. And again, I have found a new community.

Sometimes, when I’m not practicing one of these art forms, or actively engaged in one of the other activities that both soothes and invigorates—hiking in the woods, baking, hanging out with my dog, having coffee with a friend—I slip into rumination, or find it hard to stay engaged with work that needs to be done, whether it be my job, or housework, or other routine and necessary things. I’m trying to figure out how to find both joy and contentment in the mundane too, since that occupies a bigger proportion of my time most days than the other things. It was easier to not get so lost in my head when I didn’t spend quite so much time alone, but between working remotely and the kids having moved out and the breakup, it’s been a quiet two years. This time has allowed me plenty of time to do both productive work and to descend into rabbit holes I then have to work to clamber out of.

I’ve often looked back on the moment of impact that changed my life and felt as though it separated me from my shadow, and she became something more substantial, as if an outline had been drawn and filled in with tangible darkness. When times are tough, she seems to gain strength, and when I’m feeling good and strong, she retreats. And what I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is integration. Of attaching that shadow back to me the way it’s supposed to be; of the artistic with the mundane; of joy with responsibility and routine. Maybe it’s more synthesis than integration but there has to be a way it all fits together, for fragmentation to gently morph into wholeness.

When we center clay on the wheel we talk about the way this process encourages all the particles in the clay to move in the same direction, and we learn ways to shape the clay that works with its momentum, and that isn’t at all about forcing it to look the way you want it to. I think that’s a good goal for me too, working with my momentum, and gently encouraging all the disparate parts of me to start moving in the same direction, and enjoying the messiness of the process. It’s all a good reminder too that growth is multidimensional, not linear. It can look like you are spinning your wheels, but you are actually creating something extraordinary.

Love, Cath

On Clumsiness and Singing Loudly and Off-Key

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes, I wonder if these posts are too small, too personal, when one considers the chaos in the world right now. And, they very well might be. But in the middle of the chaos we are also navigating our own lives, our own ups and downs, and I don’t know if we can help each other or not, but I feel as though we should try and compare notes, share maps and routes, even though the interior world I’m trying to understand is a different one than yours. So, perhaps it is more about strategies and empathy.

It was a difficult week. I have felt more reactive than usual, less calm. We all have old wounds from the past that sometimes find a way of reopening when we don’t expect them to. I’ve written before about the way some wounds are always with us and we have to keep trying to find ways to live with them, especially after we’ve put in years of work trying to heal them only to find out how easily they sometimes make themselves felt again.

A few days ago, I was walking to the auto shop to pick up my car after having the radiator replaced. The sun was shining cheerfully in that early autumn way it does when they air is just starting to get chilly. I noted this, more as a scientific observation than a sensation or experience that brought me joy, as it usually does. I was having a bad day, battling fears that, in truth, had no reason for existing. But sometimes, they exist anyway. Sometimes, a conversation or situation reminds you just enough, even if only by a sliver, of something from long ago, and the dormant fear sees that sliver as an opening to get a foothold again, and you spend time and energy trying to demuddle past and present, fear and not-fear.

As I was walking my feet itched and I had the urge to run and I felt so cold despite that cheerful sun and I thought about how tired I was. I thought about how some fear-pain responses are not things that you can run away from, nor are they things you can hide from; you just have to keep staring them down whenever they rise up, and I remembered again my fatigue. And how it all made me feel like I didn’t know what to do, though there was nothing to do. But it felt like something in me was readying me to fight, filling me with anxiety and adrenaline.

And then, there is no place to put it, because there is nothing to fight now.

And then, to be completely inelegant, what remains is only this greasy fat blob of emotional sludge to deal with. And that takes time.

And we wonder, how long will the people we love be patient, and can they keep loving us the next time we find ourselves ready for a battle that doesn’t exist? And we wonder, how can we wonder that? That’s not how love works. But we also remember, it did work that way once, when we called it love but it was really something different.

I made it to the auto shop and paid my six hundred sixty-two dollars and drove home. I tried to look at the emotional stumbles of the week like a messy room that will never be completely ordered. It would be easy to close the door and pretend it didn’t exist. But it does. Sometimes we have to be calm and brave enough to walk by and glance in, and keep walking. And sometimes we have to be even braver and walk in, and sort through the messes for a little while, even though the window we decided to leave open because we need fresh air allows in the gusts of wind that leave everything strewn like scattered leaves again.

My messy day progressed, and I still tripped and stumbled through the messiness. Until I didn’t. I found scraps of normal, and I found empathy, and I found that the feeling of ringing-in-my-ears-except-not-my-ears finally quieted.

It is easy to feel too small, too tired, too messy. I remind myself to be loud, but sometimes it comes out wrong. I remind myself that strong and loud are different, that I am not composed of the detritus cluttering the messy room.

The past creates such noisy whispers. Maybe sometimes I’m just trying to be louder than that. Sometimes we believe in completely fictional versions of ourselves written by everyone except us.

What drowns out whispers and erases fictions? Maybe it’s just me, singing loudly and off-key.

At the same time, singing through it only gets us so far. It helps us be brave sometimes, or distracted enough to not be bothered. But we also have to face that the things that snag us impact our relationships, with our families, friends, our partner. And even if we allow that a particular wound within us is easily reopened, and no amount of trying to “fix” ourselves changes that, it doesn’t mean we get to leave the wound unadministered to. It means we have to stop sometimes, and talk ourselves through things, or, that we have to have uneasy conversations with others when talking ourselves through isn’t enough.

I’ve always been clumsy and always been told to pay attention. I am, to so many things. Sometimes we trip anyway, and there will always be skinned knees and hearts to tend to.

Sometimes, we simply must treat our wounds, again, and there is no reason we cannot treat ourselves with kindness and patience in the process, rather than judgment or resentment or anger. There is a softness maybe that we can let in, with acceptance. Maybe, when we feel something hurting that doesn’t seem like it should be, we can just say, oh, this again, sometimes this hurts, I need to lie down for a little while, I need a hug, a cup of tea, a walk. Maybe if we don’t feel compelled to judge the pain for existing it will have a little less control over our emotions and we can move forward with a little more grace. It’s okay, we can tell ourselves, each other. Everything’s going to be okay.

And it is, and it will be.

Love, Cath

Against Brokenness

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes you have to close the door on perspectives that don’t serve you.

There’s a narrative at work in our world in which human brokenness plays a key role. The idea that the pain of our lives, of the world, breaks us is not a new one, but social media proliferates it in different ways. Not long after my divorce I stumbled across this Hemingway quote: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” I affixed myself to that notion. I viewed it as a roadmap. Not only did it acknowledge how I felt and insisted that I wasn’t alone, it showed me that there was something I could do about it – get stronger.

The first guy I dated after my divorce actually told me I was broken, and very generously offered to help put me back together – the way he thought I should be. Unsurprisingly, that situation did not work out. If I was going to be strong at the broken places, I knew my first feat of strength would be to oust him from my life. I recently saw a meme about the way dating in your 40s and 50s is like going to the dump and looking for the least broken and disgusting thing. It reminded me of the way he had looked at me, and how much I’d hated it. But it also reminded me that this “broken” narrative was also a story I had told myself for some time, and hints of it still came back. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are the most powerful ones that exist. This notion of human brokenness is an idea that many people respond to, and it’s not exclusive to the way romantic relationships impact us. The world is brutal enough that we all feel this way sometimes, just like Hemingway said. The world breaks everyone, with tragedies tailored uniquely to our own hearts.

But, I’m through tolerating this analogy. Even if you haven’t thought of yourself in this way for a while it’s easy to fall back in to. We begin to see ourselves as healed, as actually stronger in the broken places, and then life pushes back. We face a challenge that’s harder to work through than we thought, or we find ourselves in the process of evolving into a new relationship, and consequently a new version of ourselves, and it naturally forces us to look at who we’ve been. That can hurt, and it can make us feel as though we haven’t come as far as we thought. Or, we witness a friend or loved one going through a tough time and it reminds us of challenges we have faced, and how maybe we didn’t come through to the other side as strong as we imagined. Through all of this, it is remarkably easy to fall back into thinking of ourselves as broken. It’s easy when faced with the pain of growth to feel as though we’re not as strong in the broken place as we thought, that maybe we are still broken, that maybe parts of us will always be broken. But in reality, we are simply changing. They aren’t called growing pains for nothing.

It’s true that hearts break, it’s true that we feel overwrought and undone by life’s pain. But it is a tragic way to think of people. It is an achingly solitary way of looking at ourselves. Whether or not we are trying to do our own repair work, or hope that others can somehow fix us, or hope to align ourselves with someone who has some sort of complimentary brokenness – as if our fractured or missing pieces can somehow fit together – the idea of brokenness still seems bleak. It is a notion filled with despair, easy to embrace, and difficult to move away from.

Within this notion of brokenness, we slide further and further away from ourselves. We imagine a fractured version of us, and insist it is who we are, and the world agrees.

I’m not saying there is something wrong with feeling broken. I think it’s pretty unavoidable. If you love any human or animal in this world, one way or another you are going to crumble. Sometimes I’ve felt that the breaks I thought I repaired are in fact poorly healed, weak spots that continue to pain me. Sometimes I’ve felt that no matter what I do, some breaks will always be there, as if their sole purpose is to remind me to question happiness that comes my way. Many of us who have experienced deep pain have at least for a time believed that the things that have broken within us have rendered us incapable of loving properly, trusting fully, of receiving the love being offered to us. But we have to stop telling ourselves these stories. We have to make other ideas just as real to us as brokenness.

It’s not enough to say, today I’m stronger at the broken places. Because tomorrow may re-break us and then what? It is certain that we need ways of looking at pain that make it palatable. We need those roadmaps, and to feel understood, and to feel less alone. Let yourself feel broken when you feel it, but don’t ever let anyone – yourself included – tell you that you are. Search the world for other metaphors.

red brick wall — Photo by Chris F on Pexels.com

I spent the spring exploring the natural world in search of metaphors about renewal and growth (remember those crickets we talked about?). Lately, I’m loving this idea of rebuilding, rehabilitation, renovation – not of broken things, but of the parts of ourselves that get neglected when we the world hurts us. The process of renovation is slow, and non-binary. It is not a journey from broken to repaired, or, to come back to Hemingway, from broken to stronger. It’s a process of devoting attention to different areas of our lives and quietly reviving them, nurturing them, clearing away debris and shining a light on the strength of our foundations. It is about making things stronger, but the focus is not on the brokenness. The focus is on seeing all the potential and helping it come into being in a new way. It recognizes the past but builds toward the future.

The rest of that Hemingway quote is this: “But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” Hemingway saw first-hand much of the world’s pain and he did a fair amount of causing it himself. Maybe we can listen to other stories than this one. Maybe there is no roadmap to renewal in quotes about the way life is either going to break or kill us. Let’s not live by quotes or memes. Let’s remember resilience, let us recall strength that comes not from how many times we’ve gotten ourselves through something tough, but the strength that’s deeper than that in us, that has always been there. There is a part of us willing to find new metaphors if that’s what we need to move forward, there’s a part of us that embraces love even though we know the risks, there is a part of us that recalls even in the most painful moments of our lives that we are more than a collection of broken parts. Let us remember that in insisting on our own brokenness we inflict more wounds.

We all handle hurt differently. I rally around metaphor, my Pied Piper leading me someplace new. I crave new ways of looking at things, hoping to understand better the world around me, the people in it, the universe of my own heart. I think our strength lies in the seeking, more so than in whatever we find.

Love, Cath

Heart-Sore and Healing: On Watching Your Children Fly

By Catherine DiMercurio

Suddenly I want to bake a pie full of peaches and sugar because my heart is sore, sore in the steady sharp low hum manner of a hangnail or a paper cut straight through the meat of your thumb pad. Sore, because I know home is not the same anymore, but for all the right reasons. Right, because it was time, time for her to move to the next part, not far in miles but autonomy isn’t measured that way. Just college, not really moving out but still, away and beyond into all the next things. And here, at home, the not knowing, what you ate for breakfast, and how is that book you are reading, and did you make it home okay. And okay, it’s not just her, because he now too wears his new independence so casually, as if it is just a piece of paper that says he can drive without me, the real license hasn’t even arrived in the mail yet. But off he goes, and did you make it there okay? Please be okay, and okay, it’s more than a hangnail or a paper cut sometimes.

Do you know what it costs? We talk about raising children and I think of the way bread dough expands to fill the available space and more. It’s only air, pulling off that miracle, the same as the breath in our lungs. And by the way, it costs everything. It costs everything to have every first be one step closer to all the goodbyes, it costs your whole heart and more.

This is what we signed up for, and we knew it would be tough, but you never know all the ways it will hurt, just like we never know all the ways it expands us. I would do it all over again because I know. I would because I know her, I know him, but if we didn’t, if someone painted us a picture and depicted exactly how much it would hurt us and exactly how much it would lift us, would we believe it? Would we believe a heart could survive that much expansion and contraction, heaving and sundering and cracking like an overfilled pie crust broken apart by something as slight and brutal as steam?

I will bake the pie after I buy a peck of overripe peaches from the farmer’s market, a little bruised and bursting through their own skins.

round orange fruits — Photo by Markus Spiske temporausch.com on Pexels.com

I don’t recommend condensing into the space of a few days the dropping off of one child at college, and the testing and licensing of the other for driving. There is so much good in it, I know that. They are strong and full of everything they need to be where they are. I can take little credit for this. I see how they were born with the spirit and the strength, always ready for the next part, even the times when they didn’t know they were. Maybe I was too. Maybe I’m ready for the next part too, even when I don’t know I am. Even when the heart is bruised and sore, growing and bursting and breaking. How many times do we mend ourselves, with something as slight and brutal as breath?

On Endings and Openness

By Catherine DiMercurio

Endings—prolonged or abrupt—always leave more questions than answers, but they still push you forward.

When I started this blog, it was with a joyful heart, and part of that joy emanated from a relationship that has now arrived at its end. Endings always take me by surprise. My habit, in the wake of an ending, is to dissect, to analyze, to try and understand. It is a way of grieving, and the endpoint—the loss—is always the same. But there are things to glean along the way. You remember the good, you arrive at new understandings about what your boundaries and values are, you learn what you can, if you are willing to look.

Here, in the aftermath of this new heartbreak, that is what I’m trying to do. Learn. Remain open, and open hearted. It’s been a dark week, and I’ve noticed a pattern in the way I cope that began to occur in the wake of my divorce several years ago. Certain types of grief and injury—those related to matters of the heart—make me want to step back and close all the doors and windows. Not to heal, not to grieve, not even as a break from experiencing the flood of emotion. It is simply a closing. Certainly many people respond to endings in a similar way. For me, I’m sure it is a method of self-protection but I find I have to monitor it closely, because it closes down pathways to everything, even to the good things, to laughter and peace. It is probably a necessary part of the process of moving through the ending of a relationship, but I am more aware of this tendency now than I have been in the past. I’ve learned that this closed place is a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Open Windows, Open Heart

There is a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier that ends with this line “And all the windows of my heart / I open to the day.” I find, increasingly, that this is where I want to land at the end of anything: open to the day. While my instincts may initially be to shut all the windows and doors—because there is a kind of reprieve there—it isn’t where I want to live.

I went to the beach alone just before dusk recently. The kids were both working, and I had so much to do. It would have made more sense to mow the lawn or clean the house. But I longed to be by water, to breathe different air. So I drove toward the setting sun. I laid out my blanket, with its stripes parallel to the water. I deposited my book and my reading glasses and my sunglasses, slid out of my sandals, and walked slowly through the warm sand to the water’s edge. It is early in summer and the water is much colder now in mid-June than it will be by the end of August. I waded in, the chill pressing against me until I grew accustomed to it. I floated, and listened, mostly to children’s laughter, and the waves and the wind, the far off chug of a boat motor.

sea black and white sunset beach — Photo by GoaShape – on Pexels.com

Back on my blanket I let the setting sun soak into my skin and I was able to breathe deeply in the way I had been longing to. It felt like respite from all the harsh emotions that had abraded my heart for a week. And I decided to let it be this way, to be reprieve. I decided to let lake water and fading sunlight soothe, and to stop trying to make sense of inexplicable things. In a way, I embraced this as a beginning of whatever is next for me, this evening alone on the beach. It seemed to matter. In the days that followed though, I felt myself sinking like a stone, that having been skipped across the waves, finally lands and steadily makes its way to the bottom. I forgot about feeling buoyed, and about beginning. I forgot until here and now, as I write this, and as I look back on what the last two weeks have been like.

It Takes Everything

So in my endless quest for synthesis I have come to this conclusion: that it takes everything to move forward. It takes shutting down, and it takes opening up, it takes analysis, it takes embracing the ineffable, it takes effort, and it takes surrender. It takes all of these things, every single day. And when the world at large also seems to be falling apart, the personal tragedies we may endure simultaneously seem both insignificant and so full of tumult they are the only things we can focus on. Which is why it takes everything, every day, for all of us.

Love, Cath