The Time Worn Path of Healing

Admit I must, I have been dwelling, of late, in other worlds. I have been thrusting myself into enchantment’s arms when my own wings have felt waterlogged by the troubles of this earthly abode.

Desiring lightness, ease and any reasonably acceptable distraction as an antidote to my own misery, and as an antidote also to the soul numbing consumption of online life (addicting distraction that it is) I am trail walking, reading hundred + year old texts and otherwise imbibing in as much furtive longing as one little, hurting, human soul might. This and meditating too.

Training my gaze both outward and upward is the therapeutic quiet work of trail walking. Setting my intention to a minimum of one good hoofing a day through trails both near and further flung, I give myself wholly over to a sensory orientation in the glowing, changing, swirl of the natural woodlands I encounter. In so doing, I surrender my inadequacies, my fixations, my gloomy ruminations and I walk, crunching, swishing leaves. Some tender still and some already brittle. So like my hurts.

Trail walking can sometimes feel like starting a new book. You plan to read it but have a hard time getting past the first few pages. Maybe the first ten minutes your head was bowed but you’ve taken nothing of the offering in and then your attention is startled into a blessed awareness of here and now by the uprising of a light breeze enveloping you with the fragrance of the cinnamon fern.

Alert and interest piqued—what story is being told here and how does it relate to the world around you? And then you see it--a radiance is revealed.

Upon further page turning steps, you hear the flutter of evergreen branches as you flush a pair of hermit thrush. Like a good writer, woodland trails beckon you—keep walking—go deeper still. And trail walking, like reading welcomes you to walk a ways as the stage is set for another encounter, with whom or what?

A sudden thump and thrashing almost takes your breath away as a ruffed grouse, flushing, lets you know you’ve been caught. Wonder-struck at the great beauty available for your soul nourishment you wander further yet. An overhanging, scraggly, time worn spruce has become a canopied thicket of old man’s beard; another withering tree, ground fallen, bears the gelatinous fruiting body of pumpkin orange witches jelly.

Mushrooms of various shapes and sizes and in varying states of decay remind you to pay attention. Time, like deliquescence, moves relentless and swift in the autumn forest.

Your hand, as you turn another page, reminds you of this too.

Several things I’ve read of late are helping me through a very harrowing time. When emotions are riding high trail walking tethers our senses to the here and now reminding us not to dwell in the hurt of the past. So too with books.

The days are long in grief's shadow and the nights are even longer and reading has always been a welcome respite from life’s storms.

Re-reading books like H G Wells The Time Machine takes me playfully, safely, into the mind-scape of another artist’s conceptual exploration of good and evil, of time and space. Of human nature and its underbelly and how we all possess the ability to both harm and heal ourselves and others in our lives.

Reading of a strangely disquieting future helps me process the strange and very disquieting personal and communal tragedies in my own life. There are difficult truths we must all face in our lives. Things and persons are not always as they seem. I process this through Wells one hundred year old words. I hold them close to my middle- aged, mothering heart.

Walking in nature, I see the parallels between my walking and my reading lives.

Stopping on the Waterside Rd to witness a gorgeous, sizable Common Garter Snake having an early autumn sunning on the red clay road there granted us a few minutes of calm presence. Watching it slither away to the ditch; an entry into curiosity about the physics of their slither. My what beauty in how they move through time in space.

A return visit less than a week later brought another lesson, less gently so.

The very snake, sunning in almost the exact locale, resting dead; its little body crushed by a tire. Its leaking blood, mostly dried, caused a darkening of the already blood red soil. Feeling suddenly throat grabbed by sadness at this little death of a friend we had only just met, we took a roadside twig to carry it to the ditch to rest without being further disturbed by traffic and to give a better chance for nature to further take its course. A small grief in the midst of what seems to be ever growing, concentric rings of grief in our lives. But one we could process in kindness and offer an honouring to.

What was our joy became our grief but not forever.

And so, the walking on trails and on blood red clay roads canopied by a glittering shimmer of autumn’s fairest show and the escape of books and essays read and tea consumed mug after mugful; all these carry me to give me strength to lift my family and continue on in the process of bearing witness to pain and holding space for joy. They give me the energy to continue on towards the goodness my utopia-given heart seems to seek. Meal preparation and tending the house and garden, homeschooling. Moving me unevenly but knowingly towards acceptance. Towards compassion and forgiveness and towards an understanding that the shattering that can happen blindly before your very eyes is nothing more or less than the flip side of the wholeness which can come from such places of destruction, rising shimmering as the healing self emerges from old trauma.

And so I pay attention as best, though fractured, as I can.

I pay attention to how I choose to use my time. Am I honouring the here and now of my difficulty while taking full advantage of the offerings available towards healing? Am I taking time for myself to care for my own needs in the midst of the emotional needs of us all? Am I admitting both my vulnerability and my strength as two sides of the same, self-wielding sword?

Mid- October was better than all of September because of remembering that books and tea and trail walking are like oxygen for me when my soul feels deprived of life-giving breath.

And I continue to watch in awe as my beautiful family do the same for themselves, each in their own way, remembering the importance of joy and beauty in all our lives.

I leave you with a finely honed quote from a magnificent Martin Shaw essay I read today on the power of storytelling and the keen need for close observation in these globally dark times.

“Of course, myths speak of the endings of things, of any number of ruptures and rebirths, and are often thoroughly drubbed with grief and the tragic. Ragnarok or Revelation is always at hand. Some beast is always slouching towards Bethlehem. Everything falls apart. The child crawls into the snow and is not seen. But over time a shoot will emerge from a heap of ashes. A girl will walk back from the forest speaking a language no one has ever heard. This is less optimism, more observation.”

I wish you healing from your own pain and from the omnipresence of our globally communal grief. And as Shaw states in his brilliant piece "...be skeptical of the quick route." He was not speaking of healing from trauma or hurt, per se but the same applies to this. Though hurt may be prolonged, it oftentimes is sudden...but true healing always takes time.

Stay close to your loves, keep your heart and eyes wide open and you will be nourished of the finest fare.

Thanks for reading,

Be well,

Jill