Notes from the threshold
There is more beyond this letting go. I know this is true, even as I struggle against the current.
Dear ones- this letter shares some reflections on loss and grief. If this is not the right time for you to read it, please be tender and care for your heart. You can always check out the archive or say hi in our community chat!
Hello.
I am late writing this letter to you- my mouth full of undigested syllables, my mind at a loss to pluck the right vocabulary from my heart, steeped in a language not so easily described.
On my way to the grocery store, I hoped for the red light to last just a moment longer, for the Ed Sheeran song to play another minute, for time to ride the wave of grief fully to shore. The last two years have been a curriculum in mourning and celebration, an advanced class for learning the delicate movement between joy and sorrow.
Death, like birth, is the most powerful of doorways, pulling everyone in its vicinity across its threshold. Suddenly, a strange world emerged. And I could never go back to the one I knew before.
In the past, I would have called it an intersection. A crossroads or threshold, this poignant precipice where they meet.
A packing list for crossing thresholds
I spent much of my childhood looking for escape routes. Exit strategies. A way to get from here to there with finality and speed. When I was younger, I found relief in the limbs of trees, rough bark against bare legs, hugging the branches until night fell. I’d often “run away” outside, down the gravel driveway or through the pasture, following our horse Gabriel’s trails through the overgrown grass.
Now, I imagine it more like a shoreline with cresting and receding waves. A rhythmic repetition, a mystical inhabiting of love and loss.
It’s not the first time I’ve straddled the liminal space between here and there, a landscape where time seems to stretch as wide as my heart, threatening to splinter in two. I used to try and carry all of it with me– as if my chest were an expandable suitcase that could hold everyone I’d ever loved or will love inside. The heaviness of that refusal to let go, to exhale as much as I inhale, weighted my bones for a very long time.
Inhale, pause. Exhale, pause. Repeat. I still haven’t gotten the balance quite right.
There’s a subtlety to life, a softening required in letting go, a vulnerability in how we open to receive.
This week has been full of opportunities to practice.
As we prepare for a physical move, I’m feeling a cumulative sense of loss– the deaths of my father and grandfather but also the loss of my connection to childhood and a feeling of safety. Although they are no longer here, this place is the last place they were. The land holds decades of memories and moments anchored to the topography of our lives together.
It’s also the portal through which Noah arrived, and the place where I created my first home with a strong community of friends. Leaving our house feels like pulling up the last tent stake, a goodbye representing a thousand other goodbyes.
And yet.
I can feel the swell, the pull of the tide leaving the shore. A call toward a deeper emptying and a longer exhale. A gentle reminder to let my heart surge again with gratitude for what was and who I’ve become because of it.
There is more beyond this letting go. I know this is true even as I struggle against the current.
“You will never feel totally ready to cross. Courage is an ally but you also need luck and guts and a child-like wonder.”
As I began the dreaded task of cleaning and organizing the basement, sifting through old boxes of photographs and letters, I found this card from my Dad.
His signature handwriting and words of encouragement, always finding me at just the right time; a talisman I carry with me into the unknown.
"here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)" -E. E. Cummings
This week’s invitation:
Are there talismans or practices that guide you in the liminal spaces?
Think of a portal or a threshold that held significance for you. What did it look and feel like? Is there a song, color, or scent associated with it?
Write (or paint, draw, etc.) a letter from your future self. What wisdom would they share with you?