In mid January, covid danced through our home, taking a unique shape in each of us. I got hit really hard and found myself wracked with incredible body aches and a serious headache for an entire day and night.
Unable to even read or binge a show for distraction, I lay in bed with feverish thoughts alive in my head.
I spent a lot of time being present with the pain too. The aches were so deep, at the core of by bones, it felt like my bone marrow was being scraped clean.
As unpleasant as it was, something significant, even necessary, seemed to be taking place.
Eventually, I rose the following day, returning to my role as mother. But I felt different, off, very unlike myself.
There was a lifeless quality in my chest. Like I was numb, or dead.
I skirted around this for a few days, keeping myself busy or distracted, thinking the feeling would shift back into something more familiar, something more “me”.
But it wasn’t, and it was becoming unsettling.
I dallied a bit longer, afraid to look at the wasteland that was the previous epicenter for my passion, drive, desire, and zest for life. It felt like death, a vacuous void of nothingness that may just swallow me whole.
One element of my character that remained intact, however, was my willingness to look at dark things, and so one day I sat down to get curious about this vacancy I that would not leave me.
I brought my gentle awareness to this place, as if tending a fresh gash in my skin, and was surprised to meet something wholly different than I expected.
On closer inspection this was not a lifeless chasm or nothingness ready to swallow me whole, it was actually the enormous presence of absolutely everything.
Like the color black, which appears because all of the colors in the light spectrum have been absorbed, this was an immense space filled with infinite possibility.
The constriction and fear in my chest gave way to a spaciousness and lightness, and I knew I was in completely new territory, but understood now that it was a beginning, not an ending.
Over the coming days I began to take this unspoken knowing and begin to put imagery and language to it. Like a collage of meaning.
The metaphor I’m feeling is that I am like a freshly tilled field or garden bed, fertile but uninhabited ground, and the task at hand is to diligently choose which seeds I’d like to plant, and those that I don’t want.
How would I like to be moving forward, and what ways of being do I want to leave behind? Everything is up for review, big and small.
Even a month later, there is still a rawness to this inner landscape. But, seeds sown are germinating into tender new life. The garden is taking shape.
I have had a handful of conversations with others who are experiencing something similar. Change is a foot. And it’s making way for personal freedom.
If life has found a way to compost your old ways and has left you open and raw, I see you.
