Exhaling

Finally, enough space to for some words to emerge from that place “before, beneath and beyond” to find their way to the surface and onto this page.

Finally, enough that has been in process for summer’s duration now settling.

Finally, like my practice’s bell that signals the need for a pause with a breath in between, embodying and enlivening that breath here.

FRIENDSHIP
My last post almost two months ago was an opening into the seldom talked about territory of the distress with broken friendships. As I’d anticipated, my exploration evoked comments from many readers, mostly women. Ranging from encouragement for naming truth, to reframing as peace-making the individual acts of courageously and vulnerably stepping in to invite conversation and clarification, to women sharing related stories of long-standing friendships suddenly going awry, to others feeling the best friendships should be the easiest to maintain (an opinion I countered). If I were to edit that post, I’d clarify that while the opening quote was ample context for both my letter to my friend, and the post, I wouldn’t “walk away in disgust” but rather in sorrow. As has been the case.

Since then, longtime friend Tracy shared a book title that I promptly borrowed from the library. Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends by Maria Franco (2022) provides an accessible frame for understanding the complexities of early attachment wounding in adult friendships. Suffice to say that John Bowlby’s seminal work on attachment theory, now decades old, is thankfully again seeing the light of day, helping us understand the tricky ground of relationships. Add in the impacts of generational trauma, its impacts on the body-mind, and coping strategies of addiction and we have more than enough reason to find compassion for ourselves and others.

While I’d thought I might have more to write on the subject, my attention has shifted though the questions I hold and the sorrow I feel continue ebb and flow.

MEMORIES
At some point during the day, as any of you who store your photos on the cloud know, photo memories appear. Sometimes it’s a past post on social media that I check for relevancy before sharing again. Always it’s the photos I’ve made and stored in the cloud over the years. For the past few days, it’s been photos of my first visit to Morocco in 2019. How utterly poignant to see over and over the beauty of her land, culture and people that captivated me then, that enticed me to return this past March, now in the aftermath of the weekend’s catastrophic earthquake. Writing today to a friend who shares my awe and appreciation for Morocco:“my return to Morocco was most satisfying…my love for her only deepened…my desire to spend more time there was only stoked, not sated.”

To others I acknowledged the bittersweet gift of travel: that with each journey taken, the world becomes smaller, more intimate with each connection made, each friendship forged. So that when such devastating events occur, I cannot help but feel a heart stopping immediacy, a bone resounding impact and meaning. Then anonymous concern gives way to personalized shock and grief.

My dear friend, Omid Safi, an acknowledged scholar of Islamic studies and Rumi, hosts regular “illuminated tours” of Morocco. Evidence of our small world when in March he was with his group in Marrakech as I was with mine in Casablanca. When he saw that I’d attended a cooking class at Marrakesh’s AMAL Women’s Training Center and Moroccan Restaurant, he wrote that its founder was a dear friend. Today he posted their efforts to gather and directly forward donations to families left bereft in the mountain villages hardest hit by the earthquake. I appreciated Omid’s post, resonant with the message I’d heard repeatedly while touring the country, reminding me of those most basic values shared among Abrahamic faith traditions: “send thoughts and prayers, please. Also send aid. Remember that our beloved Prophet says to change things first with your hands, then your tongue, and lastly by the heart. We begin by doing something.”

ANNIE
Among those photo memories are countless ones of Annie. Today a favourite taken a year ago.

It’s been three months since we had to say goodbye to our beloved fur companion. Striking for me has been the coincidence (?) of weather. On both the first- and second-month anniversaries of her passing, the day was exactly as it had been for those initial three days in June: leaden gray skies and steady soaking rain. And like those first three days, each month since I’ve felt held by the sheltering sky, in my grief, my love, my missing, my appreciation for this beautiful being called Annie.

I haven’t yet been able to return to our favourite bench overlooking the pond, nor walk our familiar neighbourhood routes. But in the meantime, I have walked. Close to 320 kms since the end of July. Up and down and through our river valley. Initially with great trepidation, now with confidence that I am as ready as I can be to walk the 16-day, 260 km Via de Francesco from Assisi to Rome. I tended to a collapsed metatarsal of my left foot for most of the spring and summer, the onset of which occurred during that day in March when walking on cobblestone through the labyrinthine medina of Fez. Finally surrendered to giving up pickleball in early June, the activity I’d counted on both to healthfully distract me from grief and to build my cardio fitness, I turned to deep water aqua fitness three times a week. Then my dear friend and former marathoner Thais, created a month-long training program wherein I’d gradually increase the distance and backpack weight to 20+ km and 13+pounds, some of the longest days walked during the highest temperatures of the summer with the greatest weight.

THREE COINS IN THE FOUNTAIN
In a week’s time I’ll be settled in Florence for several days, about to meet up with my morning food tour in Otranto. On Tuesday, an early spot at the Uffizi to once again revel in the masters. Another day a city bus up to Fiesole. Then later in the week, a train to Assisi to wander solo and adjust to the first of many hill towns I’ll encounter walking. There I’ll meet with the small group of fellow walkers and pilgrims escorted by our Italian guide, and tour company host, Sandy Brown, writer of several Italian “camino” guidebooks. We’ll conclude our via at the Vatican, giving me several more solo days to decompress in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood. That coin tossed over my shoulder into the Trevi Fountain last October, now my third, has returned me yet again to another country of my heart.

“MOVING AT THE PACE OF GUIDANCE”
(coined by my friend Christina Baldwin in The Seven Whispers)
Walking one day on my own a few weeks ago, I realized how different my preparation for this long-distance trek compared to last year’s Portuguese Coastal Camino. Both then and now booked early in the new year, as I waxed and waned in the early weeks of summer, wondering if I was up to the challenge due to grief and injury, I realized I didn’t know WHY I was making this journey. Last year I had been so clear that I was responding to a decades’ held dream. Such clarity of purpose and my reading of Phil Cousineau’s The Art of Pilgrimage shaped so much of my planning and preparation. Now except for my lists, and clothing and supplies laid out on a bed for weeks, my dedication to my training, I began to wonder about the presence of grace in all of this.

One night trying to sleep after long, hot rugged day of walking, I wept…with exhaustion, with missing Annie, with fear I’d not be up to making the trek, with worry for my husband and a sudden health complication (resolving), and with realizing that with Annie’s passing, my words had died. I did not have the energy to find a word to write. I did manage to polish up a few poems to meet some submission deadlines. And while I trusted this was a temporary state, simply my fallow not a harvest season, I felt sorrow and disappointment that I’d been unable to use my writing to heal my grief, as I’d known other writers to do, published collections being an added result. I felt especially vulnerable as in June I had asked for and received the gift of a weekly writer’s circle with the group of remarkably kind and talented and generous women writers with whom I’d just completed an online course. How could I be in a writer’s circle and not be writing?

Come a week, those four weeks in Italy I will be moving at the pace of guidance. Beyond a food tour and gallery ticket I have nothing booked. Having visited Florence and Rome several times, I feel comfortable wandering, sitting at cafes, watching people, noticing, making photos, and taking a note or many to seed future writing. Walking every day for sixteen, I know from experience there is a simplicity and rhythm that invites heeding guidance, feeling grace.

Realizing the extent to which this summer I have been holding – grief, uncertainty, worry, pain – I feel myself exhaling.

Thank you, dear friends, for your patience as I find my words and my breath. Much love and kindest regards.