Come Healing

This past Thanksgiving was the first I’ve spent alone in 30 years, and I don’t have much to say about that, except I spent the morning at the barn, feeding horses and enjoying the company of the other two workers there.

I spend so much mental energy and time in my head on other people: what they’re doing, how they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, what I can do to make things better for them, or okay, or at least all right for now. I worry about how my people are doing, and where they are in their lives.

And in the end it really comes to nothing. Or, more truthfully, it comes to me, sitting on the banks of Stony Run near the rocks where the water falls to drown out the traffic, dictating this blog into my phone.

It’s rainy, and lovely, a week after big storms draped trash in the logjams like perverted Christmas trees. The water is clear and quiet and low, like I am getting to be. But it’s loud enough to drown out thinking about other people for a few minutes here and there. If for nothing else, I am grateful for that.

I usually write my way out of troubling times, but I am unable for this particular loss. Don’t really know what to say that isn’t a cliché, and I’m pretty much done whining about things I can’t change. Indeed that’s pretty much how I found myself here ultimately — the decision to stop trying to change what isn’t mine to fix.

And so I walk and ride my horse and read and sit and stare out the window to process the next ten or twenty or fifty years of my life that is now shaped much differently than I thought it would be. And I am sick of making these adjustments all the time, these major shifts every handful of years. I just want home, my people, to be solid and stable.

But, as my late husband would say, shit in one hand and wish in the other, and see which one fills up faster.

Leonard Cohen is helpful sometimes. There’s a crack in everything and all that, but the video above is lovely and sweet and beautiful and invites me to listen to something other than perseverating thoughts about other people. It’s hopeful and depressing all at once, just the perfect tone for separation.

Enjoy.