Connection and missed moments waiting for love

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

It’s not easy here.

I want to be honest and that is a good start. You may be having a great day, where you feel alive, excited, optimistic and see beauty around you. Smelling the roses, or the coffee, or holding the hand of someone who loves you and that you love as well.

You may be taking a moment to look at the beauty around you and truly take it in.

I can do that now. I have a green detox juice with ice in a small carafe and I am sitting in an almost-empty hotel outdoor restaurant, with a million dollar view and only a few people around. Perfect to write to you. The waves are crashing far enough below this perch that I feel their power and the peace of being up here like an eagle in a nest.

Life is good you might say. And when it’s not, well, I did write that other thing to you about how to be with emotional and physical pain and how to transform it. So done, right? When you hit those speed bumps, just pay attention to what arises and love it up. Let it soften and move back into the energy from which it came, without the trauma.

Easy.

And yet…life is filled with moments that are not easy and recently, I was noticing how I skipped over offering myself care.

I like to think about the end of life sometimes, because I know it will come. Ever since I was a little girl, I have had a sense of living different lives and a sense of that place I exist when I am not here, in a body. I like that place. It does feel easier to me in some ways.

My mother exposed me to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross early on in my life and I read stories of people who were pronounced dead and then came back to life unexpectedly. Their stories were often similar and included a life review where they relived their life and somehow processed and evaluated all of it.

I know I will not live forever and one tool I use to navigate each day is to ask myself if I would do what I am doing, if it was my last day. Like right now. Would I be sitting at this beautiful spot, feeling uncertain a bit about things, and writing to you anyway? This is one of those days where my compass regarding what I am doing on the planet is a bit foggy. My hotel is loud as construction is going on. My residency paperwork had a minor issue with one form and thus, I am faced with flying back to the US to obtain another form or paying someone here a lot of money to get it.

I went to do some yoga and brought my new portable speaker and someone was already there, doing their own yoga practice. They felt serious. You know that kind of serious, spiritual yoga practice that feels like church with a tight collar?

I left my music off until they left. Then I was so happy as sound joined my practice, and just as I started to flow and move with joy, the speaker died. I am hot and I feel off.

And yes, if this was my last day, I would still be here, feeling those things and taking in the beauty around me and building up the courage to get to the point already, of what I have been writing about in my head for the last few days, for you.

It started on the beach yesterday. Really, it started a few days before on Saturday, and let’s go with yesterday for now.

Yesterday, I tried to go swimming in the ocean. This involved watching the tide and waiting until it was low, fording a murky river, and then finding that the ocean had receded and taken all the sand along with it. It would not be fun to swim with rocks everywhere.

I was hot, needed exercise, and I was alone in my bathing suit in the midst of a bunch of rocks. So I sat down.

I noticed the sparkling light on the water that always feels like some kind of Morse code that talks to me. The waves. The surfers gracefully catching or being toppled by them into frothy blenders of creamy foam.

I don’t usually go to the beach and just sit and if I do plan to do that, I bring a towel. And then, despite not having a towel, I lay down in the black sand at the edge of the sea and put my head on a pillow-like rock.

That is when something started to happen. It may be related to the lucid dreaming course I just signed up for and the audios I have been listening to that are supposed to affect your brain waves. Maybe. And I do so many things that affect me.

But here is the thing.

Let’s go back to Saturday.

Saturday I had to go to the city. It was September 23, 2023. It also happened to be my anniversary. Or it would have been if I was still married. It would have been our 34th, but whose counting?

Eleven years ago, I had one of those life-shredding, life-saving, life-changing events of leaving my marriage of 22 years. Now here I was, on my own, heading to San Salvador to sign a paper to buy some land. After our divorce, my ex-husband had gotten remarried and seemed happy. Then after one year of what I hope was wedded bliss, he passed away unexpectedly. He was just a few years older than I am now.

Now, it was Monday, and I was lying on the beach. I survived my trip to the city even though that too, was not easy. I thought I was going to meet my attorney, read the agreement to purchase she had written, sign it, and come back. Instead, I walked into a conference room with four people. The seller, his attorney, my attorney (dressed all in white like an angel), and an interpreter. In El Salvador, you sign papers together.

So, on the 34th anniversary I didn’t have, I signed a contract to buy two acres in Central America near the beach.

And as I lay on the sand, I had an experience that seemed a bit like a life review. (There is a reason I am telling you all this, I promise.)

I felt some moments from the past, that I had managed. I had navigated. They were really, really hard. I did my best and from the outside, it probably wasn’t pretty.

But what I never ever did, was saw myself, with compassion, going through those things. There is something in life about taking things in, in slow motion. Really digesting them.

I also felt something similar last week. It was new for me. I was reading a few sentences and somehow, the words slowed down into small chunks and I took them in. I felt them. I let them land in my system.

Now, I was doing the same thing with these images.

I won’t give you the details as I can feel how I would want to justify myself, to be kind to other people and try to make what they did “just doing their best.” And the same around my actions. I would maybe be afraid you wouldn’t understand if I didn’t spell out the details in pages filled with justification.

I won’t do that.

I will give you what I got, lying on the sand.

In these snapshots of me in these moments, I saw myself and I thought about how hard it had been for me. At the time, I was just trying to do my best. I was trying to do the “right” thing. That is what I started to see.

It reminds me of a grave.

My ex-husband was buried in San Diego in the Catholic section of a cemetery. None of his family is buried there. I imagined his new wife would choose to be eventually, but she was re-married a year after his death. So, I have no idea.

His brother died unexpectedly as well soon after him and the ashes were scattered at sea. I don’t think many people came. The family, I mean.

I visited the grave with my son later. Here in the United States, cemeteries are big and I don’t think people go to them often. The flowers are usually plastic, if there are any at all. The grass is mown and hugs the headstones.

My son and I left a little stone each, with a prayer, on his headstone, along with some fresh flowers. I imagine the stones are gone, manicured away along with the grass.

But stones or not, we haven’t forgotten. We left an acorn at the top of Croagh Patrick, the sacred mountain in Ireland, and we lit a candle in the little pilgrimage church there after reaching the top. We didn’t forget.

somewhere in here is an acorn prayer

I have a friend in Sweden we had visited years before. He lives near the biggest cemetery in Europe and I would go walking there. I love cemeteries. They remind me about life being temporary. They tend to feel peaceful and quiet. This cemetery was well tended. Many graves had fresh flowers, even though the deceased had been gone over 100 years. I was touched by this.

It reminds me of the parts of ourselves that get buried, or put aside. It is fine. There is nothing wrong with it. Sometimes things are hard and we get through them, and then they get buried in the cemetery of our psyche. We may feel we have “processed” the event. We may even see it from the distance.

For instance, I find that difficult events I am still processing show up in my memory like I am still experiencing them from within. When it is all finished and I have loved myself, and the energy of the experience has transformed (in its own good time…), it becomes a memory, just like any story I would tell and see from a distance.

So… cemeteries and parts of ourselves. I don’t think my ex-husband is alone, or without care, no matter where he is technically buried. It is just that the care and connection is happening in a different way, like at the top of a mountain in Ireland. The energy of returning to something, even if not physically, and offering some tending and care, that energy really matters.

On the beach, I was remembering his funeral.

There was a moment in the middle of the service when my older son left. And I followed him. I was wearing my black leather stiletto “divorce” boots I bought for our final mediation meeting and an outfit I wore only that once that reminds me of a witch. It had a long skirt with a matching shirt with sleeves that looked like wings. It had a lot of black in it, which I still thought was respectful to wear to a funeral. I learned that most people don’t wear black to funerals anymore. At least not in Ojai, California.

Click, click, click. My heels on the tile of the church, as I tried to leave quietly with so many emotions brewing like a cauldron…grief, pain, confusion, uncertainty.

My younger son gave a speech, but I didn’t hear it. He was sitting in front with his step-mother and new family. I was in the back with my older son. I was the ex.

My older son was not invited to give a eulogy. (This is where the pages of explanation and family mess could be written and I will not).

The first person to get up to speak was my ex-husband’s new stepson.

That is when my older son left and I decided to follow.

I remember we drove around a bit. My uncle stayed. He had come to be supportive, especially of me I think. We still had to pick him up.

So, while we waited for it all to be over, and drove randomly through roads lined with old oak trees, we passed a cemetery. An older one with real graves with tipping granite headstones and a little fence.

I had sent pictures of my ex-husband’s life and of him with our children to my younger son to use if the new family wanted, to show after the funeral. I was the one who took pictures in our family. I was the one who had most of the pictures of my ex-husband. A few days before, I let iphoto make them into a slide show and sat in a hotel room with my parents and two boys as the years flowed by on the screen. I had careful to make sure I wasn’t in any of them, which wasn’t too hard as I was usually the photographer.

So, that is the event that came into my mind. There were a few others as well…all related to his passing and me.

A moment when I made sure my older son had an opportunity to sit alone with his dad, who was by then in a coma, soon to be removed from the respirator.

The new wife arriving at the hospital and slamming her purse loudly onto the tile when she entered the room and realized my son was there without her supervision. Her angry steps, echoing as she walked away. My younger son going to comfort her.

Those were moments that were hard for me. And I never felt it. Not like I was feeling it on the beach. I never looked at myself in those moments and said, “Wow, that was not easy.”

Instead, I evaluated my choices. I wrote about it in my unpublished book and then I rewrote it to make it “nicer” and more compassionate, with a little more empathy for others, based on feedback from a friend.

I went to my teacher at the time and paid her to heal me. She said my soul was twisted from the family dynamics of it all and she could untwist it pretty easily.

And this seems different to me somehow, from what I have written to you about before. I have suggested you feel things more in the moment and offer yourself care.

But what about the cemetery bits? Those memories that stick somehow where you really have never offered yourself some compassion. Those memories that you have always tried to fix somehow, maybe by feeling regret, or self-hatred, or anger towards someone else? Or you have had someone work to shift it. Therapy. Psychedelics…

I think there is something different in pausing, with care and kindness, to really take yourself in and see what you went through. It is like visiting a cemetery, where parts of you that needed protection are tucked away.

I don’t know why, but lately, some of those memories have arisen for me the past few weeks and I find compassion arising. This time it has been for myself.

Sometimes, we are taught this is selfish. Or narcissistic. I don’t think this is true. I think it is simply love.

A few weeks ago, compassion arose in me for a person who caused me a lot of anguish. The part of me that had been tucked in the cemetery was able to peek out and see him through a different lens as someone very misguided, simply looking for love. What he did was not ok and yet, there it is. A part of me was always angry and that part of me somehow, was able to see through a different lens. One of those moments happened when I stopped seeing from within the experience and feeling it from that place, to moving to the place where it was digested. It moved to the place of becoming a story I tell myself from a distance as the energy of me is no longer in the cemetery. It is not that I ever repressed the experience or the memory. It is simply that that part of me saw. She and I could see something that we had never seen before and with that perspective, she and I could no longer be trapped in being angry. The perspective resurrected something in me.

This came from grace and current circumstances that allowed me to see it all in a new way. And in the end, the whole experience is care for myself, in the bigger picture I think.

And all in its own time.

We can’t force these things.

I just suggest that if you find your life slowing in some way, whether it is through reading words, or listening to music, or a lovely kiss…you savor and let it in. And if you have moments of memories that come to mind as you read this, you look at yourself back then, or now, and notice that yes, it was hard. It was hard for you then.

Somehow, I think it matters a lot.