Post-Moving Reflections
For a while before I moved, my time in San Francisco was hanging by a loose, chipping love. When you love something for a very long time, you forget how to stop that particular form of love, even when you are growing out of it and growing into someone who will change in loving something else. In a way, to move was a hard decision to make: The fear of the unknown. The fear of making a wrong decision. The wobble in your being when you are paying more attention to the thin legal story that stitches you to a country than to the certainty—wild in your soul, moving like grasses in a breeze—that is the call and sturdiness of spirit.
It took a lot of effort and energy to close that chapter of my life. I have been on the Central Coast over a month, and it was only this week that I received a clear invitation from the waters.
I walked shindeep into the ocean for the first time yesterday. Gave her honey. Stood with the waves lapping around me for a long time, noticing, especially, the palette of the skies and the waters. Colors glint in a different sweep here. The drama extends out of a softness.
The Bay Area still lives, startled, as a memory within me. And, there is much reckoning to do.
The last three years left a tear in my heart. Many connections dried up, folded up, stung. The honey I swirl into the ocean licks, as flame, just where my tongue was burnt. The witch speaks up about the pain no one in the village wants to admit, and that is why she is punished. I was listening to a talk by sister-teacher Sobonfu the other day, and as she mentioned this as a common enough motif, there was something about the seeing she offered me from the other side—having walked back to the source river of compassion—that started breaking down the condensation of hurt and disappointment in my soul. May the stains left by misunderstanding and betrayal of faith continue to lighten, disappear completely, within me. For, I want to be new and green and vital again inside—in that smudgy part of me that knows that when you have to stop looking up to elders and mentors, it is your time to step up and meet, once more, your power.
Though I have done inner and sacred work already to forgive and let go, there is a relief in acknowledging the tears still held in the hollow. As I breathe in the space that opens up, I will continue to release.
It is the way of the world, croon the elders on the other side. You are to trust only the core of stone. Not even us. You are to mend and let the heart of the world speak. Does the song know what happened in the song? She is stern and prophesizes. She’d flung her naïveté in the air, but out of the rive in the tongue will grow a stronger, cannier tongue.