The Journey to Beautiful

 It's been thirteen years.  This place needed a bit of a face lift.   Are you for stripping down to the bare minimum? Are you ready to shed that which binds?   It feels right to slip off the old, what was.  It's common to accumulate layers over time, over years. What does it take to peel away, to loose the encumbered lot? A trigger, a catalyst - a catapult, a launching forward from the wire-wound bog of what was.   There is only onward and it is promising. A benign fire waiting.

 13 years ago.  I set out on a journey that had been a pivotal point in my life.  It's been 13 years,and feels like an entire lifetime.  Was it a dream?  My life is so different now.  I am so different, it seems.   To commemorate, a writing I came across.  I haven't written in so long, so I borrow from another. Herself A society unconsciously committed to patriarchal ideals will spend years pouring the whole ocean of a woman's soul into an ice box and call it good.  Then, there, inside that ice box, she will remain.  Unless. Until. She catches a glimpse of another oceanic soul. That glimpse has the power to awaken her within her small, dark, chilly tomb. Once she is awake, she will begin to  remember she too  is ocean.  And it is the remembering that has the power to set her free.  To return to her home.  Herself.  

My Mom passed peacefully in her sleep early Wednesday, April 7, 2021 after a long and difficult battle with cancer.  Grief is no joke, but I am hoping to learn something from all of this.    

 There really are no words, or titles, for the last six months or so...actually it has been almost a year that time seemed to shudder on its axis and then move again with no shape or rhythm.  The stilted stops and starts have been maddening under normal circumstances, but the last seven to eight months have been unreal.  So an anecdotal accounting of happenings: The world came to a screeching halt mid-March.  In that month (just prior to everything unfolding) I would take what may very well have been my last trip with my Mom, up to Virginia.  We stayed in a yurt and it was a great time. Soon after mid-March, I was laid off due to the shut downs, and I mourned this loss because it was more than a job - they are family.  It was probably just as well because at the end of March we learned we would become grandparents (this was something of a miracle as we weren't sure was possible).   Two things were reasons for a move away from the Gulf would happen...