Letting Go of my Parents' Home and a Refuge of 20 Years
5/13/23
These are images of goodbye.
Letting go, I am finding, is the alchemy of grief and active invitation to the future. It requires us to feel and experience gratitude our hearts can hardly hold. It is practice for death and rebirth.
Amazingly, Facebook reminds me today that on this day 7 years ago we said goodbye to our house on Innerarity Island. I cherish those last moments alone in an empty house allowing the memories to rise and live beyond the walls of time and space. It was a much smaller 'death" than this one, but practice nonetheless.
Scrolling through these pictures of my parents’ home you will see Cypress trees towering above the property. I remember the day we planted them. Dad asked me to travel with him to their house, then being built, and bury the tiny tree saplings in the dirt with hope for the privacy they would surely bring along the back property line.
I enjoyed the day with him. My heart was elsewhere that day, working through changes within. Today I feel some similar stirrings I haven't quite touched since that time. The kind you feel when your heart demands you know yourself more deeply and do the hard internal work new connections bring. And look, these trees tower above us today. How I have changed. And then in some ways not at all.
I learned this week through a lovely leading of spirit that Bluejays plant forests just by doing what they do-burying acorns. The life cycle is so astonishing.
These cycles aren't limited to one place. Little by little we live and love and let go and life persists with exponential beauty.
Thank you for this beautiful ode to a place that has meant so much to you! In the past year and a half, I have said goodbye to two places that have been with me since childhood, and although I can revisit them, they are not as I knew them and thus no longer “mine”. (One I revisit often, and the other I have no desire to.) I started a practice with these goodbyes--taking the time to say goodbye to the space (physically going to every nook and cranny) and as you said, “allowing the memories to rise and live beyond the walls of time and space.” My versions of those places may no longer exist, but their memories live on in me, and I can revisit within myself any time I want. There’s still lots of grief and loss, but I discovered that it’s easier for me to process that after making space for a (lengthy) goodbye. I’m glad to hear others have found this practice to be useful as well!