For the month of August, I’ve accepted David McIlroy’s 30 days of writing challenge ✍🏻
The Inner Traveler is a digital cafe where chairs are pulled up, warm beverages are poured, gorgeous pastries are on the bar, and baskets of warm blankets tucked into corners. It’s a humble invitation into my inner world.
This publication is reader-supported and croissant-fueled. If you’d like to show your appreciation, buy me a croissant. It pairs wonderfully with coffee...and life in general.
The other day, I found myself going down a Substack rabbit hole (as one does on this platform) and stumbled across the latest post from Lachrista Greco’s Rage & Softness.
You might have know her as The Guerrilla Feminist, both on Instagram and Substack. But now she’s simply “Lachrista Greco”.
I like what she has to say. A lot. And her most recent post Grief is a Weighted Blanket hit me directly in the heart. It helped me understand this living phenomenon we call “grief”.
I’ve been wading through my own grief bog for the last two years/my entire life and…I’m honestly left wondering: how does one manage this beast?
I’ve become well-acquainted with grief. My birth chart has some pretty intense signatures that speak this, but between you and I, we’re barely on speaking terms. Most of the time this acquaintance looks like me thrashing around like a gasping fish on land.
This is not a sexy look.
Other times it lends itself to some crazy deep wisdom that bubbles up out of nowhere. Suddenly I’m oh wise crone. This is an especially neat party trick when I’m having deep conversations with friends, or helping someone hash out a particularly tangled issue in their life. I’m a wizard in this arena.
But, me and my grief? Sometimes I simply don’t understand what it’s trying to tell me. Why are you here? What do you want? WHY ARE YOU SO DEMANDING?
Whilst reading Lachrista’s Rage & Softness post, a quote jumped off the page and shined a small but powerful light on my very dusty window of understanding.
In the Wikipedia definition for “Earthquake,” it says: “It is the shaking of the surface of the Earth resulting from a sudden release of energy in the Earth's lithosphere that creates seismic waves.” Grief is a sudden release of energy, of love. And we can’t prepare for it. We don’t need to.
I have spent so much of my life preparing for grief. I have been in a constant state of baking this pain, inhaling its bittersweetness.
Oh my. That part. The part about the sudden release of energy, of love. There really is no preparing for it.
I wish I knew nugget this two years ago, when I was fighting my own massive grief-wave. For weeks I could feel it coming. The tide, slowly being sucked out to sea, until it could go no more. I watched the wave build and build, until I finally gave up.
Mind you, I’ve gone heartbreak and grief plenty of times in my life. But this wave felt like The Big One. Like a tsunami. And when a tsunami comes for you, there’s literally nowhere to run (so I’ve heard). I was at its mercy.
And, as a tsunamis are apt to do, they flatten nearly everything in their wake.
That’s me. Absolutely flattened.
Making myself three-dimensional again is one of many questions I’m living at the moment.
Tell me, what makes you feel three dimensional?
I’ll leave you with a photo I took in June 2021, of a freshly planted rice paddy in Bali set against the rosiest sunset. Seeds planted in rich, abundant soil, ready to spring forward with life-force.
ps. for those of you wondering about my bed that was delivered yesterday….well, let’s just say the bed delivered. A full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep was had.
My kids and I (yeah, my wife, too) were camping this last weekend at a great campground with several beaches walking distance from the tent. There were tsunami signs on all the major roads. My youngest looked at those and instantly worried. "We can never camp directly on the beach," he said firmly. "There's no way you could get out of your tent if a tsunami came." He talked about how high the waves would be, how they would consume everything around, and his eyes drifted to those roads heading uphill as though they were some kind of salvation.
I didn't say this exactly to him, but I think he's beginning to understand it anyway. Some waves are going to hit no matter what you do. There's no amount of hill-climbing that will save you from that impact. So we stand on the beach today and revel in its beauty, in the warm sunshine, in the salty breeze, and we acknowledge that living life out loud means taking risks.