When Grief is Still

I was twenty minutes from my location, when I realized I’d been driving for two hours without listening to music. I was enjoying watching things, as they changed, as I moved further away from D.C. and deeper into rural Virginia. The absence of construction was the first thing I noticed, and appreciated. And then, the trees. The colors of their leaves. The trees ability to go from one thing, one form of being, to another. The way they made this transition, without fuss, without clinging, without trying to be what it once was.

When I pulled up to the glamping site, I immediately noticed a red bird. It danced in front of me long enough to video it. When I returned back to my car, after hurrying to get my stuff inside the tent before sundown, the red bird had made its way onto my car. I’d never seen a bird act this way. Again, giving me time to record it, I videoed it flopping on the side of my car and then onto the top of my hood. I’d be a fool, I thought, not to know that something was speaking to me. Feeling both inspired and unexpectedly sad, I whispered, Thank you. Thank you.

Gathering the firewood from my trunk, to bring it into the tent, began to ignite a flood of memories. It brought me back to the little house on Pitts Creek. It brought me back to the raspy voice of the woman who once lived there. It brought me back to her love and never ending assuredness in me. It led me back to how 2023 began, the three deaths that came back to back. Each loss had initiated a type of mourning unlike the other. I’d carried my grief for each of them in the only way I could: forward.

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”No person ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and they are not the same person.” —Heraclitus of Ephesus, Greek Philosopher

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I’d been looking for someone who was gone.

I was looking for someone who, like the 15 firewood logs I’d so diligently burned and tended to, had transformed for a greater purpose. I’d been changed by the many fires of life, over this year. Some fires had brought with it passion, inspiration, joy, and memories I’d seek to relive over and over again. Other fires burned me, but didn’t consume me—just as the fire had a few times throughout the night when it got too close to my skin. These fires brought up my old patterns, fear and anxiety reflexes. These types of fires, though, were the spiritual triggers that would continue to aid the areas within me that were still healing, a cautionary reminder that I am still on the path, that this is an endless journey.

In bed, later that night, after turning off the lights and poking the fire and adding another log of wood, I could hear the hustling of the leaves up against the tent. I could see the shadows of the trees shifting and swaying; I could hear what I hoped was a squirrel (or some nonthreatening animal) scurrying in the woods. Just before fully surrendering to the crackling of the fire, allowing it to take me into a deep sleep—I said it once more, Thank you. Thank you.

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I usually forget, but I always remember: I know how to come back here. I know how to come back to me, to my center, to my pure heart, to my truth, to the place where I can hear from God, again. Peace always finds me. Stillness, always shows back up. I’d been grieving forward this entire year, and it had changed me. I wasn’t the same me I started this year with. My leaves were falling. My leaves were also changing colors. I needed the space to accept that. I found peace for them, and for me grieving them. And for me grieving me, the me who was no longer me, but a new me. Grief had carried me here, it’d brought me to this place. I couldn’t see this before, but this time alone, unhurried, gave me this still vantage point to see my life—not from the way it was, but the way it is.

And for the way it is, Thank you. Thank you.