There is Nothing like the Shore to Welcome You Back to Yourself

This essay was written on a bleak day last November when I was at a very low ebb.

Thankfully, the tidal waters of my own life include very caring people who help support my family and I to make it from one moon phase to the next. And very recently, my personal repertoire of support has expanded to include a powerfully healing release meditation which happens to also utilize beach imagery. I think when I wrote this essay in late autumn, I was preparing myself to find this gorgeous healing visualization talk by Julie Ela Grace which I now practice often.

Please keep in mind when reading this essay that a large part of my spirituality includes the belief that even in our bleakest moments we are held by something larger...something beautiful... which is guiding us back to ourselves and to each other should we choose to open to it...and oh, how this beautiful, broken world deserves our opening to it while we can...

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could." Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

It's been very wrongly said autistic persons do not feel. As a neurodivergent women in her late forties, I feel too much and seemingly without end.

Here I am walking Waterside Rd alongside Pownal Bay in late daylight, the temperature just above freezing, with winds from the north but I am well bundled for the outing.

The tide is low and the season late and so I walk the beach as far as I can, which is not far as the wet, packed sand is black with a rich band of seaweed and I am unsure of my footing on this saltwater, grassy plain. I manage to walk just long enough to feel awful at upsetting a shorebird from its peace.

I learn later from my son that it was a Sanderling who was frightened out of the eel grass by what I thought was my quiet presence. Not quiet enough—the little white shorebird took flight, its frazzled call penetrating the air around us.

The road along the bay is a restful place to walk which is why we come to this place of great beauty. Sometimes we hear cattle calling out, seagulls mewling, a tractor chugging back from the manure pile in a nearby field or seals barking on the remnants of wharf they bask on, mid-tide. Today, seaside, all I hear beneath my heavy toque is the Sanderling's startled call and the wind through the sea grasses and roadside blooms of wild mustard.

It is desperation that brings me here, alone. I always have a couple of my kids with me—their need for the solace and beauty of this place as great as my own. I feel half- naked without someone by my side yet the barrenness of this solitude is the balm my spirit needs.

As I walk along I dare to reach my un-gloved hand out in the frigid briskness to touch the fading face of Queen Anne’s Lace and find its delicate blooms still soft. It has not folded in on itself for winter yet. I want to hold its slender form to mine. To tell it that I understand. I see it still. That it is so beautiful. That even as it enters its winter there is a place for it in this world. Its place is here. Its presence wonderful and important. Its time to still exist, is now. Its very being, confirms this truth.

Yet, if I am the truth of my own existence, why do I feel so lost?

Beside it, pale yellow, mustard petals, silken and perfect. No sign of fade on this hardy plant.

Myself, I am half-withered and broken open both.

It’s been so long since I was free of care even the word carefree feels like a foreign language on my tongue and I am clumsy, self-conscious and awkward in its presence.

Or am I?

Walking alone, my own throat is blessedly without sound. No need for talk or counsel or to even nod in wordless agreement. Just me and the wind-borne silence. Me stuffed into a heavy sweater, vest, jacket, scarf and toque.

Me, myself and I.

The childhood phrasing just doesn’t work here for we three are all strangers now—I have been layered up against this cold world for so long that to walk half- bared this solitary afternoon feels like I am walking into an other-world.

Ahead the other-world beckons further.

At a curve in the road is a trailhead. The no trespassing signs which once warned against public entrance are no longer visible in the overgrowth of brush and bramble but the trail entrance grass is well trampled and the old, rusty gate removed from sight. An acquaintance's brother owns this land on which the trail meanders between a depth of forest and the cliff- edge of the bay. He said we are welcome here but when I enter I always feel unsure and today is no different. Late daylight seems safest in that the likelihood of someone else traversing here as darkness looms is lessened.

I enter in.

On the beach side, the trail head is lined with brittle, yellowed grasses whose elegant seed heads nod and sway as if to say come in--be not afraid. Statuesque, even in this late stage of their life, they tower above me. I walk along—see rose-hips-bright jewels of autumn-- shimmering amid the gold.

Further in, I pause, the woods behind my back protecting me from the rising north winds. Stopped, I peer through cliff-edged, tree limbs to the wave- licked waters of the bay which spill out to the Northumberland Strait.

The ferries which run between our little Isle and the mainland are canceled due to gale force winds. On land, the gusts expected to reach seventy km/hr. I remember this as a low, rushing sound moves through the evergreens behind me causing me to turn back suddenly. The chill of a deep eeriness swells within as I try to scan an impenetrable woodland scene beyond the nearest tree, bare-limbed as it stands before me, its revealed, aged form still lovely, though leafless and not bearing fruit any longer.

Looking to the western pathway I attempt to see if what I hear might be the low rumble of a dump truck coming down the nearby, red- clay road. The sound shifts suddenly, rising, rushing, towards me like an oncoming train and I am frozen on the tracks. Instinctively, I want to run or crouch down low and cover my head like this is a military plane fly- by and I am caught in the helicopter blade’s wind tunnel.

Yet, just moments before this tunneled path felt safe. Felt like a kingdom and I was its queen. I stay put. The gust, like a wave of panic, blows through out to the sea before me and the scene of my immersion is hardly ruffled. I wish I could say the same.

I wonder what a storm feels like for the creatures here. The little Sanderling I saw a short time before—where would it shelter? And yet, I am here myself, as an asylum seeker.

I want to crawl beneath the canopy of low slung, saltwater-sprayed spruce to feel the mid-November’s colding lands beneath my prostrate form. To lie there and let dark descend completely with its wild winds carrying first of season flurries on night’s inky wing. I want to feel cold seep into places that have been shut off for so long. To will myself to stay present for the sensations, prickling at first, that call out to my consciousness that I am alive. I want to come to life by freezing, still and slowly.

My mother always said that animals go into the forest to die when they know their time is near but I do not feel my own death as omnipresent. Besides, so much of me has been hiding for so long now I am not sure that I’d know my faded self lurking in the shadows.

It is my own life I've come to seek. That and some blessed freedom.

I want to heal my wounded-ness in this place. To let an earth connection strip away all the garbage, all the artifice, all the ways I have been untrue and uncaring to my own heart. To wander those spaces that I have sealed off through fear, through exhaustion, through the simple act of surviving so many long years of not knowing what was wrong.

I want to forgive myself for my lack of knowing, for being so vulnerable, for not having the knowledge of my own neurodivergence, of the root of my deep feelings, of my myriad sensitivities or of my children’s pain.

I want to sleep on the edge of the night, on the very forest’s cliff edge, beneath a canopy of evergreens and let the cold seep into long abandoned places if only to see if there is enough warmth left in my heart to keep on feeling in this world.

Acknowledgments— That this land I occupy is unceded Mi’kmaq territory and that I am speaking from a place of distinctly white, middle- class, privilege to even hint at romanticizing sleeping outdoors in the cold in a housing crisis during a pandemic. This is not the intent of the piece—rather its intent is to speak to my own numbing desperation at being a deeply empathic carer in this world whose feeble yet brave-hearted attempts at caring don’t have the outcomes or as far a reach as I would like.

Thanks for reading!

Wishing you the gifts of wellness, ease and warmth as the human markers of time move from one calendar year to another.

Yours in beauty,

Jill