Leavings

 

            Few of us look forward to change. We like routine and comfort. Yet over the course of our life, we will leave many places and people, and they will leave us. The reasons will be varied—new jobs, marriage, wanderlust, and sometimes what drew us together was one mutual interest, and when that had run its course, we drifted apart. Sometimes we simply sense that there is more waiting for us.

             When a loved one dies, leaving enters a new dimension. We lose our sense of time, of place, of belonging, and sometimes we lose our self. The ground is swept away from under our feet, and we drift on an unknown ocean. Eventually we arrive at a distant shore, which looks like the shore we left, and while the hills and landmarks are familiar, they are cloaked in a filtered light. For a time, we do not unpack our bags. We feel empty, abandoned, and fear that we will never be okay.

 

If we live long enough, we will mourn the loss of many people but with different levels of intensity and sorrow because of the kind of relationships we had with them. Many of us will write the dates of their deaths on a calendar because we don’t want to forget the impact of their life on us. Each year on those days, although our memories of them become faded and creased, time again stands still as if the loss has just happened and they had just been here.

 

When death takes away the person we planned our future around, we have to step back, re-group, and head off in a new direction. As we nurture their spirit within us, we let our longing for their physical presence go.

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In her book All the Leavings, Laurie Easter talks about the departures in her life. She writes about relationships ending, of death, of the struggle for people she knows to not die, of people coming in and then leaving. She understands that these changes happen because people are always in motion, like a river, and while we can’t prevent the moving away, there are things we can do to foster the moving towards. 

 

It’s important that we be attentive to what is going on today and to the people around us, and not consumed about what might happen in the future or held back by events from the past. Her words encourage me to look at events and relationships in a different way, especially when they don’t work out as I had hoped. She doesn’t see these disruptions as failures but of relationships having their time to be, of sharing what we have with each other before one of us departs.

 

Laurie talks openly about the hard events in her life and allowing herself to be vulnerable to the stress, horror, doubts, and fears, and of doing what she can to help others and herself, knowing that sometimes what she does won’t be enough. It’s then, when we feel powerless to make a bad situation better, that we have to trust something beyond our control. 

 

The regrets of our life have a way of piling up and holding us back from living today and going where we want to go. We stop taking risks and venturing into the unknown as we settle into the comfort of the limiting present.

 

Laurie lives off the grid in southern Oregon. Perhaps because she has few electronic distractions, she is more attuned to the needs of people around her and to the movement of the seasons in nature. What holds her together, and what guides her when she’s unsure about what to do, are the values that she believes, like the strength of community, the wisdom of nature, and the power of faith, hope, and love. These allow her to do what she can and let the universe finish up.

 

Each day we are born again, with the opportunity to live directly from our heart.