By Catherine DiMercurio

It’s been a bizarre spring. The last time I wrote, it was just the beginning of it. Now we’re in the thick of it, the irises are blooming and the peonies are about to burst and the buckthorn is proving to be its annual nuisance. Last time I wrote, I was figuring out some paths forward and now they all look a little different.

When I began this blog about open-heartedness, I invited my readers to wander with me, to explore heartbreak and wholeness and everything in between. I think this blog has been around for about eight years, and one of the main things I have discovered in that time is that there is wholeness even in heartbreak, there is wholeness when we feel healed and wholeness when we feel broken. To be human is to be whole; the breadth and depth of our experience is encompassed by who we are in this life and nothing—not pain, loss, grief, fear—can deplete the full richness of our identity. We absorb it all, we metabolize it, transform it, re-emerge as new versions of ourselves over and over again.

The wholeness can feel elusive sometimes. In parsing out recent events, I tell myself I don’t have anything to prove, but my brain cycles through the discussions I’ve had with myself, formulating a defense for decisions I’ve made, paths I’ve taken, as if I have to account for them to anyone other than myself. She has a high threshold for what “makes sense,” this internal judge of mine, and hears arguments daily, usually when I’m in the shower and relitigating my past. I sense it is time to move past such habits, that my energy is needed elsewhere.

But still, I have a strong desire to be “fair” and “reasonable,” and to be perceived that way, so holding myself to account is habitual but sometimes excessive, often unnecessary, and occasionally, cruel. Looking back over my life, I see the ways in which my gut was right, but that it was also right to test its theories, as guts don’t always see nuance, or the need to have certain experiences anyway. But that gut has a good head on her shoulders. I’m learning to be mindful of what she’s instructing. I find that I’m often wary about going with my gut instinct right from the get-go because it is difficult to determine if something is actually and truly wrong when I get that “something feels off” kind of feeling, or if the discomfort I’m feeling is a natural and necessary part of a particular growth journey.

There is also some work to be done when I consider what I just said a few sentences ago, about my desire to be perceived as fair and reasonable. Who is my target audience and why should their perception matter to me so much? Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.” I remember reading that in college, being struck with the boldness of that statement. I feel as though I’ve internalized a lot of expectations about who I’m supposed to be and how I’m supposed to behave, and I get caught in the trap of overexplaining, even to myself, why I’ve chosen a particular course of action. Maybe to be regarded as fair and reasonable is so important because I’ve always been a sensitive person who was often told she was overreacting or misperceiving a situation. So I’ve grown accustomed to overcorrecting and interrogating myself, as if there is some value in making my life make sense to other people. There used to be value there. I craved the validation of others, people I trusted saying good thinking, and yes, that makes sense. It’s always nice to hear but in truth I haven’t needed it for some time, though part of me doesn’t entirely know that yet.

It is a strange thing to consider walking through this world and accepting mystery and to say, maybe I don’t need to understand that. Maybe I can stop trying to figure out why I feel better alone than when I’m in a relationship. When I knew myself less, the opposite was true. I thought I was a better me in partnership. But just as my understanding of myself has improved, so has my understanding of what does and doesn’t constitute a partnership. Maybe when we’ve done all the philosophizing and therapizing we can, all the studying and soul-searching, we can say, for now, I accept this as a mystery of life, a mystery of love, a mystery of the universe and of my own soul. Maybe my energy is needed elsewhere, maybe yours is. Possibly it will all make sense when we’re ready. Or, we are ready and it does make sense and we are slow to acclimate to the truths of our existences.

This morning I was preparing to go outside at dawn with my coffee and my dog. He usually sniffs around the yard and I fill the birdfeeder. I examine what’s blossoming: currently, irises, dahlias, snapdragons, impatiens, columbine. I usually hope to see cardinals and woodpeckers before the sparrows and grackles arrive, but lately that hasn’t been the case. Today, though, when I looked through the window before opening the door, I saw a fawn grazing near the overgrown herb bed. I looked past her and noticed two other deer nestled in the myrtle at the back of the yard. Soon, one rose, another fawn, who also began grazing in the yard. The larger doe who I assumed to be the mother remained reclined. She laid there so long after her offspring had risen and wandered that I began to wonder if she was hurt, or, perhaps even giving birth to another baby. I watched the three for a while through the window, feeling glad that they felt safe and nourished in my yard. I left them to their quiet morning routine, told my dog we’d go out in a little bit. I returned after about twenty minutes; they had gone. When I finally wandered out into the yard with my dog, I could see the indented places in the myrtle where they had lain and I wondered if they had cozily bedded down for the whole night in my yard. It gave me such a feeling of peace to cede my space to them for a little while. I imagined that the myrtle was still warm in the chilly morning from their soft brown bodies.

There has been some grief this spring, some loss of a sense of safety and well-being in my little circle. I know that this morning’s sighting of the white-tail deer in my yard was a chance occurrence but also I don’t know if it wasn’t a tiny little gift from the universe, a brief glimpse of a mother and her two youngsters feeling safe and fed and content and together. Maybe mornings like these are for embracing little mysteries as they come to us, and in them, we sense our own enough-ness.

Love, Cath