Awhile back, I stopped writing for anyone but my private journals (many small books I keep in my purse, my nightstand and a designated file in my laptop), at the time explaining that I was empty and had no more to say. That wasn’t entirely true. An awful lot of what I needed to say did not need to be shot out into space. The words swirling in my head and heart needed to be contained in a capsule of my own making, so as not to hurt anyone if they spun out into orbits where they didn’t belong or wouldn’t be understood.

It wasn’t that I was going through anything painful at the time, either.  In fact, it was the exact opposite. For the first time ever, I’d found myself living in a space that was safe — with no sharp emotional objects and lots of love to protect me.  Weird, because this was a planet I’d never been on before.  Most of my life had been spent filling my days and nights (and every fiber of my being) taking care of others and dodging shrapnel from other people’s battles (both internal and external) and after a number of decades doing that, I’d finally charted a course into an airspace with little to no turbulence and I was unprepared.  You see, nobody at ground control had prepared me that the act of “letting go” would be the very thing to leave me feeling incredibly weighted.

In this crazy little thing called life, we all experience death and loss and seismic changes that leave us feeling untethered and adrift. Sometimes it’s because as people circumnavigate their way through their own lives, they often don’t include you as part of their fleet. People die. Children leave. Loved ones turn away or find other people, places and things to love. It’s all a part of the journey, this being left in your own emotional space at the end of the dark-dark day.  As someone who has spent a lifetime caregiving and attending to the needs of others, I can tell you – you often spend an inordinate amount of time and energy just trying to get through days (and weeks and months and years) taking whatever good – or simply good enough – comes your way.

For me all of the letting go business, while being in a safe haven, had left me feeling heavy.  So heavy, it felt as if I was being pushed as close to the earth as possible.  It was odd, because I’d thought that the act of being pulled in another direction, one that was insanely positive, would leave me light and weightless, but it didn’t.  I felt anchored in in a way that just left me feeling heavy.  Ridiculously heavy. My head, my heart, my derriere… and the very air I was breathing.  All crazy-heavy. It was as if I’d landed on a lovely planet with a wildly different gravity without appropriate suit and gear.  Strangely, I was a stranger in a strange and foreign land and totally off-kilter.

As the mother of two nearly grown children, a lot their becoming more independent had a great deal to do with my change in gravity.  My daughter is off at college an in the driver’s seat of her own life now, with minimal navigational input from me (which is how it should be). She is a strong, beautiful woman with a solid map on the dashboard of life and her gifts are many. I’m occasionally invited onboard as a passenger, but she is essentially her own captain now and I couldn’t be more proud.  My son is taking a different journey from the one originally charted, but that kid is forging ahead despite the obstacles of autism that are in his way. He is not in my line of vision, which means I cannot grab the wheel when he veers into the void of the unknown (which gives us both great anxiety), but communication is good and we are hopeful.  Occasionally he careens off the side of emotional debris that floats in his path, but so far has managed to upright that craft of his and move forward with nary a scratch.

There is a ling in the Beatles song “Across the Universe” that encourages me to think I will eventually get off of the ground and launch myself into a new place in space: Sounds of laughter, shades of life are ringing through my open ears – inciting and inviting me. Limitless, undying love which shines around me like a million suns… it calls me on and on, across the universe.

Albert Einstein said that “Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.” I realize that nothing’s gonna change my world – but I can learn to navigate the space in which I live differently.

xo – t.

 

“Unpinned even by rudimentary notions of time and space, dreams float or flash by, leaving in their wake trails of unease, hopes, fears and anxieties.” – Stephen Brook

Mothership (noun) – A large spacecraft or ship from which smaller craft are launched or maintained.