In the Woods

The season of sun has arrived. Days have been filled with glorious swims in the pond and walks in the woods with my dogs. As I sit in the woods I allow the silence to overtake me and I settle with the sounds, the feelings, and the thoughts that arise. I have emerged from the trees remembering the days I first fell in love, and memories of who I once was as a teenager and young woman have flooded back. Silence is an amazing healer and I have learned that this practice is taking me farther into a realm of healing that i have longed for for some time.

I wrote recently about a reunion that is coming up for me. My twentieth high school reunion. The other day in the woods, a lot surfaced for me of my younger years. I remembered playing guitar, climbing mountains, clearing trails and saving salmon streams, being a camp counselor, a cross country runner, and snowboarding high peaks filled with soft snow. My life was rich as was my identity. This is before the crash. But I also realized how much was going on even during these years of amazing accomplishment and strength. When I was sixteen my boyfriend was shot and I was recovering from an eating disorder. When I was 17, I suffered from depression and anxiety; panic attacks. When I was 18 at college I was hospitalized and again when I was 19. At twenty I had an abortion. 

Silence and time in the woods has helped me remember the beauty of my life. As I heal my grief sitting on the earth, and the sadness cascades away from my being, light encompasses the blueprint of what has made me. I fell in love with my lover, my husband, at nineteen, and we had amazing adventures, living in the country, in the wilderness, and camping. We have worked jobs and made many friends over the years. There may have been struggle, but as I release the tension around the suffering all I am left with are joyous memories of who I am. There is so much to be grateful for.

Back to the reunion, it is still hard for me to enter gracefully my younger years and remember fully who I was without tears. I was holding my head high through those events, and I hoped for great things. Truth was that I received a major diagnosis that would plague me through my twenties and thirties, and still is with me today. But lately I am grateful for this diagnosis. It has brought me closer to my family, as helped me keep a relationship, it has created an inner commitment in myself to the creative arts, and it has given me something to write about, a source from which to draw wisdom. I received a couple of texts from classmates encouraging me to attend my reunion last night, and I just cried and cried in my bed. Am I ready to face my younger days? I have left so much behind. I am hoping I have the strength to attend, and yet I barely leave my home these days. But I was touched, as well as reminded that I still have a lot of grief to move through. So here is to another day in the woods. May I receive much revelation and healing from mother nature, silence, and myself allowing in the light and the healing.