In early 2020, when I started thinking about the whole notion of severance, I envisioned a train, an engine with a long line of identical black cars stretching out behind it as far as the eye could see. This was me. I mean, I was the engine, but the cars behind me were all the things I’d picked up over my lifetime thus far – the rules about how to act as a child, a teen, a young adult, a parent, a wife, a daughter; how to live and work and what constituted Right and Wrong. (I am not discounting the impact of the Covid lockdown as an influence and backdrop for this work. It feels as though it was the perfect time for me to begin really questioning all the things I thought I once knew about how the world worked and would continue to work).
Dragging all of those cars behind me was getting heavy, and while you might think that divorcing my partner of 26 years would lighten the load a bit, it didn’t. That’s because even without a husband, I was still pulling all of those lessons and beliefs along behind me, making it harder and harder to navigate the hills and turns. I began to wonder whether there were things in those cars that even deserved to still be there. My life had changed so drastically and I had begun questioning so many of the things that I had been taught. It was time to do an inventory.
Throughout the first six months of 2020, I sat in inquiry and pretty quickly, I started decoupling train cars. Somehow, I knew better than to think I could simply unhook and leave them behind, though. I was going to have to pay attention, look at each car and discern what was slowing me down and engage in some purposeful, intentional letting go. I think it was this that led me to the rage ritual, because what I became acutely aware of was that some of those cars contained deep, searing grief and others burned hot with rage. Neither of those things felt good to carry, and they somehow needed to be changed, shifted, metabolized.
I spent a lot of time going over the grief and rage rituals again and again, unpacking one freight car at a time, spreading all of the contents out in the sunshine, picking through to find the things I wanted to save, and composting the rest. I began asking questions about how I could shift the way I felt when I thought about losing my brother Cameron – the resentment I felt toward my parents and the searing, sharp pain I felt when I realized I don’t remember the sound of his laughter. Writing about it in Truth Has a Different Shape helped, but I also had to find a way to alchemize the physical feelings, and the ritual gave me that opportunity. Miraculously, there did come a day in the spring of 2022 when I woke up thinking about Cameron and realized that what I felt was a tenderness, an upwelling of love, and I had the sensation of remembering what his warm, brown hand felt like in mine as we walked to school through the alley. It was such a stark difference to all of the previous times when I’d flinched thinking about him, physically feeling the grief of his loss, and re-telling that story in my head.
In some cases, I dove deep into the piles of things and tried to discern whether or not there were ideas worth saving, but the more I dug, the more I realized so many of the things in those cars were old, outdated, hadn’t seen the light of day in years. And yet, I still carried the reflexive responses in my bones and nerve impulses. The first step was to flip the switch and let the car go and watch as ideas about what it means to be a “good” mother slowly drifted away behind me, coming to a stop on the tracks as I steamed forward. I liberated an entire train car of “should.”
Once I had done this work, it was time for me to begin looking at the evidence those cars had left behind on the engine – where had they dragged and pulled and made my movement harder? What shadows lurked inside that were informed by old ideas of gender and class and how the world ought to work? I knew there were lessons there, things to be gleaned that would help me propel myself forward. I was acting as an ancient herbalist, extracting medicinal compounds from deadly plants to use intentionally and carefully for healing; sifting through the things I’d learned, the things that had weighed me down and kept me small, in order to discern whether there were gifts there I could use. There were.
I found the courage to stop flinching away from the triggers I had about my kids getting sick. My first reaction has always been to spring into service, start finding doctors and researching solutions and sending supplements and Uber Eats, but there is always an undercurrent of panic. When I started sitting with that, I realized that was PTSD from years of watching Sean suffer and get sick and not processing any of my own fears about it. The girls were two and four years old the first time he got really sick in Rome. It was a long, excruciating travel day back to Seattle where we ended up in the parking lot of the local fire station, me laying my elbow on the horn, screaming for help next to Sean who was immobilized in the passenger seat, and two jet-lagged and frightened toddlers in the back. He spent two days in the hospital and similar episodes played out every three months or so for three and a half years, a medical mystery until a specialist from the Cleveland Clinic finally figured it out.
During those three and a half years, Sean continued to travel internationally and work at the same pace between hospitalizations and terrifying episodes in China, Prague, Argentina, and at home. The girls watched him being carried out of the house on a stretcher, visited him in the hospital, and he was so determined to be fine when he wasn’t sick. I lived with the constant fear of getting a midnight phone call from a colleague saying he hadn’t made it this time, that they were so sorry. And in between, when he bounced back and went to work, I was expected to do the same – to not share the severity of this situation with his family or mine lest they worry or treat him with any sort of sympathy. We didn’t talk about it, to each other or the kids. When I began to explore all of this so many years later, it seemed obvious that I would be left with some trauma, but I’d let myself be gaslighted about it because it did all eventually work out just fine. But in doing so, by not ever taking the time to process any of it because “it was over now, wasn’t it?” I had denied myself the opportunity to really acknowledge how fucking scared I’d been. Every time one of the kids got sick, my body remembered the powerlessness I had felt, and I was on fire all over again, agitated and panicky to find something to do, some way to help, to protect them from being ill OR feeling the scary feelings they must certainly feel, too. How many other times had I smoothed over big feelings, tucked them away in those train cars, buried beneath a mound of “I told you so” and “don’t over-react” and “it’s all fine” and “don’t make waves or make anyone else feel like they have to take care of you”?
For months and months, I emptied train car after train car and spent time looking at the stories I’d hidden away and the layers of armor I covered them with. I had to keep going back with tenderness and compassion for myself, finding the gifts and composting the rest and I kept bumping up against the same things over and over again; capitalism and patriarchy and toxic masculinity. These were the things that had encouraged me to secrete the pain away and not talk about it. These were the things that told me I’d be fine if I just ignored them, but they were wrong. I had a lot of unlearning to do.
I began to think of it as me coming into the world as one half of a sheet of Velcro. As children, we are the soft, fuzzy side, ready to receive, and the coarse sheet is covered in the hooks from our family traditions, cultural heritage, and society’s messages. We grow up thinking that these two sides form a foundational “One,” as ideas about gender roles and hierarchies and competition and what success looks like attach themselves to us. This work I was doing was the equivalent of me peeling off the hooks one by one and deciding whether or not they were actually true. Emotional rules, rules about who we get to be, how we think and act, rules about what our values ought to be and what we should want out of life. All of those things are handed to us in a myriad of ways, but each hook bears scrutiny and requires us to be discerning about whether they belong. If you look closely at Velcro, the soft fuzzy side is complete on its own. The hooks embed easily, but they aren’t necessary for wholeness. They were meant to attach us to something, but unless that thing is helpful and supportive and meaningful, is it worth being attached to?
I spent so much of the first half of my life surviving, and then I began to seek. I looked for answers inside and outside. I embraced the intensity of my emotions rather than lamenting them, and I became. I began to fully inhabit the skin I am in, push into the edges without apology.
At some point, I stopped praying and my life became a prayer. I stopped looking for love as my life became an expression of love. I learned that learning is the most important thing I can do. I went to live by the sea and learn about it so that I could emulate it; moving with the rhythms of life, balancing what I take with what I gave, providing nourishment and space for a multitude of things.
I remembered how to play and dance and sing and laugh. I moved from a place of fear and lack to slowly trusting in Enough, and now, I revel in abundance. It is a glorious life, complex and rich, moving, learning, growing, feeling all the things and working to remain centered in what I value.
One of the other lessons I was beginning to learn was about letting things be in their natural cycles. So much of Western society is trying to force our will on the natural world without understanding the consequences of that. When human beings developed the ability to cultivate crops and domesticate animals, they believed that all their problems were solved. They put up fences and learned about farming and animal husbandry and figured that the days of not having enough food were over. But they didn’t account for the fact that more food meant women were more fertile, that they’d nurse their young for a shorter time, which meant there would be more children to feed than ever before. Family size grew and grew, and humans had to get bigger plots of land to accommodate those larger families. That’s the way the natural world works – everything is interconnected. There are consequences for everything.
Humans have counted on artificially prolonging (or shortening) all sorts of cycles for thousands of years and we’ve felt the effects of it in different ways. We ignore the seasons as much as we can, using artificial light to work well into the night when our bodies are meant to be resting. We tell women they don’t have to menstruate at all if they don’t want to and give them a prescription to prevent bleeding. We have stopped rotating crops in most places, compensating for the loss of nutrients in the soil by pouring vast quantities of fertilizers and other chemicals into the ground so that we can have what we want when we want it.
We like to pretend that we are somehow above being natural creatures, or outside of it at the very least. We push ourselves to exceed the boundaries of our energy, letting our minds set the pace without ever checking with our bodies to see if there is enough fuel to do what we want to do. We ignore or prolong endings or try to forego them altogether, wanting some things to stay the same forever and other things to grow without boundaries. And there are consequences to all of that, every single time.
Part of coming back into harmony and alignment with myself meant not railing against things that were ending. When a friend said to me, after my divorce, “Congratulations on making a marriage last for 23 years! That’s a big deal!” it cracked me up at first, and then I stopped and thought about it. She was right. It was time for my marriage to end. While I was enraged at Sean for doing it the way he did it, ultimately, I knew we weren’t supposed to be married for fifty plus years. It was time for it to end. I was grateful to him for having the courage to do it for both of us, even if I vehemently disagreed with the way he did it.
Just like my kids were coming to the end of their time at home with me, I was coming to the end of my time in Seattle. Clarissa Pinkola Estes talks about the “Life/Death/Life cycle” in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves, acknowledging that everything has a natural ending point. While it can be sad and painful to see something end, resisting its demise ends up causing a more prolonged agony. And, perhaps more importantly, the death of that thing makes way for something new to come in its place. When I began to clear out the old ideas and belief systems I’d grown up with, I made space for the universe to present me with new options, new ideas, new adventures. And boy, did they ever show up. The trick then was to tap into my intuition so that I could discern which of the things being presented to me felt right. Which of those things were pulling me toward them from my gut? Which ones were traps, pushing me toward them from my head, saying they were things I “should” want?
About 15 years ago, I began to notice that whenever I was at a crossroads of sorts, or embroiled in a big, messy question, I saw a bald eagle. I could be out walking and suddenly there was an eagle, sitting quietly in a tree above me. Or I would be crossing Lake Washington on the 520 bridge, deep in thought, and there was an eagle, perched on the light. It happened often enough that I started to trust it. I knew that when I had a big quandary, I would be steadied by a visiting eagle, and it truly happened, over and over again.
When I moved to Santa Barbara, I began seeing pelicans everywhere. This is not unusual at all, but when I paid closer attention, I noted that they travel in large groups, and they love to fly low and fast over the surface of the ocean - never quite touching the water, but skimming it, one after the next. I was fascinated. I researched it and discovered that a group of pelicans is often called a pouch (this little nugget of information delights me to no end), and it made me think about the way they stretch their beaks to an almost absurd size to accommodate their food.
Often, as I walk on the beach, I am seeking something - following the threads of inquiry about what my life will look like in this next chapter. Always, when I am feeling most confused or unsure, a pouch of pelicans flies into my frame of vision, swooping down from the sky to hover just barely above the water, graceful and coordinated.
The symbolism of eagles is around devotion, freedom, truth and strength. They are often solitary. Pelicans symbolize nurturing, humility, and generosity. They are highly social and work as a team. The importance of this is not lost on me. I do feel as though I'm in a place in my life where I am being offered opportunities to stretch my container, expand my idea of what it means to be in community and to hold more than I ever thought I could.
UNLEARNING
The more mass something has, the stronger its gravitational pull is. Patriarchy, toxic masculinity, capitalism – these things are all weighty with history, bloodshed, the mass of white men. They grounded me to principles that are difficult to question. When the very foundation you stand on is pulling you toward it, it takes courage and imagination and conviction to consider flying or swimming out to sea. And the energy it requires when everyone around you looks so content to just stand still is hard to summon. Will it be worth the risk? I wasn’t always sure, but I know now that the answer is Yes. A full-throated Yes.