Soul Drought

Now that I’m going back to Jack Grapes’ class next week, I need to start journaling again and trying to remember what I learned the first go round.

I feel like I am in a different emotional place than I was in the last time when the loss of my babygirl was still so fresh. Like this morning, I woke up feeling light and hopeful. Thinking of all the things I want an need to do. Are there enough hours in the day? This is new again. I’ve spent so long dreading the morning light. Dreading the idea of having to get out of bed. But now I think my optimism is coming back. My outlook on life and the possibility that their are possibilities. The renewed belief in the belief that “where there is hope there is a chance.”

I’m moving forward. I’m busting out. I’m branching. Reaching for the sky. Expanding. Loving. Growing. Reaching. Filling. I’m filling up again. The parts that were empty for so long, are starting to be watered and moist. Things are beginning to grow again. Like the LA river in the summer, so dry and lifeless. Or like those documentaries I’ve seen about the Serengeti. That’s what I’ve been through. A drought. A soul drought.

The land was dry, hard and cracked by the heat. Lizards scampered across the wasteland, stopping and standing statue-still in the sun in order to warm up their cold blood. Some of the animals, like ideas, have tried to traverse this hot dry desert but are staggering and swaying. Finally, they fall. They land with a thud and a puff of dust. Wheezing their last gasps of air. Lungs scorched. Legs leaden, and unwieldy. They lie there, in the sun, unable to move, react or even blink away a fly that lands in their eye.

I know that feeling. I’ve been their. My ideas have been those animals that will soon wind up a bleached bone shadow of a life that was at one time vital, but unable to survive. A monument of succumbing to pain, heartache, and other emotional pathologies that seem to come out of hiding, and trap you down a dead-end alley when you are at your most vulnerable.

I’ve been there. Perhaps parts of me are still there. But one day the rain came. First in tiny little drops. The rain would tease. One small cummulo nimbus cloud, alone in the sky dropping a tear or two, on the hot desert floor.

Ahh! A drop! The drought is over. But it turns out that that lone cloud drifts away. And the heat has won out again, and the bones, my bones, continue to dry and bleach in the sun. This ritual of hope and despair, light and dark, wet and dry continues time and time again, until one day their is a cloud burst that is constant. Relief is on the way. At first you don’t believe it. You question it. How dare you let yourself truly believe that you are, that you can be well again. Is it just the clouds, the rain teasing, having sport with you again.

Soon though the rain becomes more regular. Seeds deep in the dry earth begin to tingle and stretch as the water trickles down through the dried cracks deep into the soil. Little buds start popping up from out of the earth. Creatures that have kept themselves hidden underground start to venture out. A tiny drop becomes a puddle and can spread into a lake and connect to a river that leads to an ocean.

Animals from far away, begin a pilgrimage, because they know instinctively that the rains are back, and everything will be green again. There will be fresh water to drink and they can thrive, and mate, and have babies and fight predators and live to fight, drink and mate another day. They come back, they all come back.

But the dried bones don’t come back to life. That part is over. It’s dead. It will never totally disappear. As the years, decades and centuries go by, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, they will disappear to the naked eye, but microscopic particles will remain somewhere. Like grief, the particles will remain deep inside to remind you that a life, a love, a dream was lost, but finally your life continues. You can grow again, you can thrive again. You can be moist of soul once and again and again and again.