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Forty-Three
:
It Takes A Space To Create
This has been an exhausting week. I have worked, processed, and released much (though I’m sure I’ll create more that needs to be worked, processed, and released). The emotions that I’ve been feeling do not seem toxic, even if they are passionate. It all feels right, and I notice that I again seem to be breathing a bit easier.
When I took out the trash tonight, I took the cards that my ex-lover had given me, tore them up and tossed them out. I read each first, to give it my attention and intention. What I did was deliberate, and what I felt was a little more weight lifted.
Normally I have a ceremonial burning. A few months after my first love and I broke up for the first time, when I felt ready and clear, I took much of what I had that was hers, went into the hills, dug a pit, and buried it. I did it with ceremony and felt that the earth was a proper place for those items. But I did keep some things, including a lock of her hair. After we broke up the second time, some 18 years after the first separation, I took all those cards and letters, as well as what I’d kept from the first time (including the lock of her hair from when she was 16) and I dug a pit, built a fire, and, honoring what I was doing, without vengeance, I remembered each item and I put them in the fire to release both myself and her. In the same manner, I did likewise with the mementoes from my second love, recapitulating and clearing out all that remained, keeping nothing.
When my latest love and I broke up for a number of months nearly two years ago, I did the same burning ritual, but I held some back. When we got back together, I was glad I had kept some of her cards and letters. But this time, the finality of which is most clear, there was nothing to hold back. And this time, burning did not seem right. It seemed like it needed less ceremony, it seemed like the earth was a proper place for the residual to clear itself. So I simply held each card, read them, all without sorrow, all with a light eye, and I tore them and released them and noticed how the evening was very much alive.
And I am now starting to relax a bit, again. There is one more week of lecture, one more weekend of grading papers, and soon finals will be over, grades turned in, and another semester, another chapter, closed. Summer school will begin and it will be a busy six weeks that will follow, but it feels like a pattern of fluidity is returning once again. It feels like it just may be those lazy days of summer. That sense of space, that sense of room to stretch and move, is very much a part of my spirit, and I will welcome it back into my life.
The first part of this year has been fraught with change–no, make that upheaval. It is as though I’ve been in the middle of an earthquake that has gone on and on. And when the earth moves in such a manner, there is precious little that feels like stable footing.
I am going to sleep tonight, after a bit of reading, a glass of wine, and a trip to the Jacuzzi to feel the night. I will not wake up to an alarm in the morning, and that will be good. I will run, eat, grade, do some chores, do some reading, write a bit, and loaf a bit. Mostly I will take my time. And I will breathe, and look outward, and smile and be thankful. I am 54, I love my children, I am learning (a bit slowly perhaps), and I cannot help but feel that the best is yet to come.
In that, we shall certainly see.
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Copyright © 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 by Travis
Gibbs
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed,
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