I squeeze honey-love memories into my bones.
This sun-soaked September visit to my home state of Kentucky emanates and ripples a restorative love, a remembering of irreplaceable belonging, a recognition of celebrated and encouraged inherent gifts, a relaxing into a luminous aspect of self wildly and serenely embraced by family, friends, a golden named Gavin.
My Kentucky stay is a funeral and a wedding.
An exiting and an entering into a new chapter.
I wait for the Universe to announce the news about the baby, because someone must be having a baby to keep the circle complete, and sure enough, the beaming soon-to-be grandmother delights in sharing about the destined arrival of a Sagittarius star-seed.
A straight-forward response. Universe, how very Sagittarius of you.
And all these natural cycles spin around love.
My grandmother’s funeral, my darling friends’ wedding, and all the coffee dates, evening strolls, morning swims, truck rides, and Chipotle dinners connect by an interweaving thread that is love and only love.
My grandmother Peggy chooses poetry to carry her final message of love to family and friends.
I wear a dress bright with red roses for my grandmother, the same dress I wore for Christmas, only the heat dictates summer shoes instead of wintery accessories.
Before entering the cemetery, I voice concern about hauntings, about spirits snuggling up to my aura and leaving the graveyard with new invisible friends.
I half-joke. I am a jumpy, superstitious mystic, and I hold my breath and lift my feet when I drive by cemeteries so the spirits can fluidly pass by under my tingling toes.
There are no hauntings at this cemetery. There is a presence of peace cultivated by ritualized goodbyes, and mindful pauses of grief. There are no hauntings here, so I sit tall beside my sisters in a lush green space surrounded by pines and listen intently to the poems of the Romantics, the same poems my Libra grandmother recited by heart.
I am serene in my listening, in my posture, in my being, because I feel my grandmother is close and closer now in spirit than in the suffering that gripped her last years, and yet, the Emily Dickinson poem, the concluding poem, slays me open and tears spring from a pool of grief.
This stream of sorrow slows all my movements until I find myself sitting alone in the family living room and I stare because I just need to sit and stare and be in this feeling of sadness, departing, honoring a life. Later, I write the words emerging like the tears, and later, I go to water and swim strong strokes underneath a lavender twilight and I’m delirious with a desire to squeeze tight the fleeting beauty of this life, my life.
So I let life be water. And I meet the waters of life with my own flow of breath. Discernment and clarity are my two favorite words, and the breath animates them.
Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul coaches me through staying present to the tides of grief and not being consumed by the intensity of the emotion.
I am aware that I am aware.
I notice that I notice the tension, the increase of loud thoughts and cluster of crowded feelings when I am lost in fear-based reactions.
Breathe. Cleanse. Re-center in Love. Begin Again.
I relax into the heart space. I let the feelings emerge. I let the thoughts pass by. They are not me, because I am the one watching them travel by, and most are ego-formed, and that’s because I am human, and that’s normal and that’s all right, and I don’t need to dive and analyze or entertain them at all. Onwards they go.
I choose love.
And this is my mantra as I step aside to officiate my friends’ wedding. My ego, my fears of doing “a good job” I repeatedly release, because this is not about me, and fears constrict the perpetually gifting of the vividness of life.
As I stand in this Bluegrass dream of vivid greenery, as I prepare to recite my friends’ own form of love poetry, I affirm to be a vessel for a high-vibrational love, to speak out-loud the couple’s vows, their union and their blessings.
I hold tight this memory of a love-bright couple whom I cherish and greatly adore and the collective aura of their family and friends gathered to cheer and support the start of their marriage.
After the ceremony concludes, I walk off alone, under a sky fading into a gentle swirl of pastels. I breathe slowly, sipping in the nectar essence of this memory of witnessing two people choose one another in life and in love.
And when I am present, I feel my grandmother’s luminous spirit, especially when I am still. I see dark-winged butterflies, a sign from the other side.
My grandfather finds a love letter written by his young wife in the early 1950s. This is his sign. And he lets me read her careful cursive and I cry.
During my stay, I remain close to my sisters, and listen to their current iteration, their current struggles and joys. I walk with my father in the evenings, and talk with my mother in her garden and in dog car rides. When my path crosses the paths of friends and acquaintances from Lexington, I relax into being very present, because when I see you, I want to clearly see the you you are right here. All other thoughts, all other impressions, all other distractions subside. This is the heartbeat of life.
And my heartbeat pulses with gratitude and grief when I arrive back into a storm-rinsed Austin. There’s a coolness that refreshes and relieves. The extreme heat of the Texas summer fades into an exhalation that beckons with an enlivening in-breath.
So I breathe this all in. I sport ankle boots and a jean jacket and drive into my Lone Star city with a deepening ease that I am loved, and am loving, and I shimmer waves of love to my grandfather, to my newly married friends, whenever they dance across my mind.
During my Kentucky stay, I witness the beginning of a marriage and an end of a seventy-year partnership. I stretch my heart to include the contradicting complexity that is life, and yet, at its core, and at the core of my life right here – thousands of miles away in Texas – it’s all connected and it all glows with love.