Unfolding, this thread, across these days.

_________________

There is a movement of emotion moving through me, a disorganized psycho-sensorial process that is having a conversation that I cannot ignore. Tears are close and frequent, and while there are moments where I remember the social awkwardness of being a highly sensitive human within a culture largely ambivalent and oppressing to deep feelings, there is a profundity to this experience. There is a confusion which, upon deep inspection with my loving partner via conversation, runs deep into the history of my life---all the way towards my genesis.

I'm driving to town to get an elective pain reliving injection for my emergent cervical issue. A

fterwards, at the stoplight, a man about my age is holding a sign. I hand him something, feeling the weird unfairness of this world, and he says "god bless". The tears feel so close, are so close.

When did I stop feeling?

When did I Stop letting these tears fall, even and especially amidst the daily exchanges of my life?

Why did it take a severe diagnosis of a dear friend to unhook the gate across my feeling heart?

Why am I not crying for the oceans, the burning forests, the bleaching corals, the shelter animals who, this very day were euthanized because they were unwanted?

And what the fuck do I do now?

Maybe it was the way I saw intergenerational trauma landing across the next generation of my kinfolk. Or maybe it was the profundity of sitting near my mom to celebrate her and dad's 60th anniversary, and the feeling of her delicate hand holding mine.

Maybe it was reading that a heart-leader of deep ecology and ecopsychology has entered hospice, stepping toward her Great Turning and transformative rite of passage.

Maybe it was the unshakable sense of belonging I know/feel/experience while sharing my gifts on the land in ceremony with thirteen new adult friends and my coguides, and the unbelievable and immediate vacancy of that sense evaporating once I'm back amidst my busyness.

My breath catches at times. My neck is sore. The nurses were talking about such random things, even gossiping about a coworker. Meanwhile, the doctor was moving the sterodial fluid into me via a long, x-ray-directed needle. Outside and just down the street, my friend and his wife are making calls, trying to understand what to do.

Further south, families grieve the loss their children and community members. A bit east, wars rattle on, dislodging the humanity and basic goodness from all involved, leaving a razed landscape of the heart.

Two days ago I sat atop a mountain nearby, and absurdly but not, made a phone call. The tears landed on those craggy orange rocks as the wind flowed past.

I intended this week to write about somatic psychology and somatic therapy, and in a way, I feel I am. Not, perhaps, the historical shenanigans; but rather, the undercurrent of embodying processes which are having me.

What calls me, what is calling within me, within the ocean of my water-filled self, comes a felt sense of subtle movements. Yes, the confusion is confusing and the grief is tenderizing, both shattering expectations and baring the reality of our sacred, precious, fragile existence. Under those, within those, as those me's, is a love for this life, so visceral, so all-encompassing, that words don't really make sense....

...that grief is love, confusion is essential, and the paradoxes pull us toward.

I walk out onto the south deck, full dark almost complete, and see my girl at our forty-year old picnic table. I am struck by the romance in her heart, two candles illuminating the well-worn surface with just enough room for our hands to hold while we offer gratitude's for this life, this food, our bodies, families, friends, strangers that make our lives possible, the sun and trees, the river, and this brilliant lifeworld. We kissed, and I kept my eyes closed after to let it really touch me: utterly unrepeatable (Nepo, 2007).

She has no idea how much such moments touch me, renew me, awaken those hidden corners who silently lose hope, quit believing, and die a little each moment. Yet across the decade of our time together, her subtle and at times powerful initiated presence has brought me back to life, brought me out of my great unraveling and back into my own great turning. (Macy & Johnstone, 2012). A couple days ago, apropos of nothing, she reached around me and offered her touch/love/empathy as embrace. We were standing in the kitchen.

I remember a few years ago, Colleen and I were talking about the details of something from our research psychology PhD coursework. She said, so clearly and succinctly (this paraphrase does not capture the potency) that whatever she reads about, whatever angle or psychological theory or praxis or whatnot, she reads it as if she has that part in herself too. In that way, she understands psychology (and life) from the inside, embodied, as lived.

I find myself here, now, near the middle night, attempting to turn toward the seat of this long-held, somatic ecopsychological confusion that has threaded it's way across and within me.

How can I let this grief mentor me?

How can I let this confusion belong too?

And how can I be with the utter incomprehensibility that, in every single moment of our lives and of this vast multi-species lifeworld and cosmos of existence, it is all happening.

All the good in us, all the bad in us, all the life and vitality in us, and all the decay and death in us.

The joy.

These tears (now).

The sunrise.

And the sunsets.

- 0   -

deep bow

    tbird

References

Macy, J. & Johnstone, C. (2012).  Active hope: How to face the mess we're in without going crazy.  New World Library.

Nepo, M. (2007). Facing the lion, being the lion: Finding inner courage where it lives. Conari Press.