Season of Change

 It's been a long time since my last blog post, which was about the steps a person might take to self publish a novel. There's a reason for that, and for once it's not my own lack of motivation. Over the last couple of years I've had so many changes in my life, and not altogether good ones, that I am just now getting back to a place of routine. Since the dumpster fire that was 2020, I lost both of my parents, left a long term relationship and moved back to my touchpoint town of Bemidji.

Suffice to say these experiences have stalled me, and probably changed me too. I'm reminded of a woman I knew as  teenager, a friend's mom. She had lost a child years before. I remember noticing how nothing rattled her. She didn't get upset by a bunch of rowdy teenagers charging through her house, sometimes breaking things and sometimes smoking pot behind her woodshed. I remember wondering how it was that she would just laugh it all off. My own parents would have grown red and blown up at the thought of a dish broken at the hands of a clumsy teenager, let alone drug use on their property. Then I thought to my self, "she knows what a real tragedy is, and it's not this." That is the gift of grief. 

There are others too, and you might as well take them because it's not an exchange you can barter in. In the days after loss I wanted only certain things: to escape into the deep hum of the wilderness. That was number one. 

And I wanted to lean on others, to talk about it, to feel supported. Some people stood up more readily than others. They were usually those who had known loss themselves. It turns out empathy is not born in a vacuum. Human connection: that was number two.

I feel like this should be a list of three, except I don't know what number three is. I guess it was just to be back in a place where I was in control of my own days. I could wake up, make coffee and write before going to work, then come home and walk my dog down to the lake and spend all evening trying to skip rocks if I wanted to. Well, I am re-entering that place. Except now I write from my dad's old desk, and I do it with a deeper center. It feels good to be back in a place of creativity, and hopefully with a more precise compass, one that points always to what matters.