I’ve been your second mate so long, it feels unnatural to slip on your hat and chart the ensuing path at the helm. The wind is at my back, however, and I have many fellow sailors helping me hold the wheel steady and true. My eyes are ever fixed on the horizon and I feel your presence all around, all the time.
I lost my dad - as many of us have and will. I’m doing all the grief things, processing all the changes, being pragmatic, stoic, a realist. My dad and I are so alike in this way. I wonder, though, if in his quiet moments he literally sobbed like I do at the profound loss that death creates. I don’t really cry, I just straight up weep, expelling gut-wrenching, verbalized sobs into the void. And then I’m done…at least for the day.
We haven’t been to Hummingbird Ranch since Easter, because not only did I lose my father, but also my grandmother. Her death at 105 is a different sadness - acknowledged as a life achievement rather than a life taken away.
There’s just been a lot going on, but here I am, sitting by my fake fire, in the comfort of the Mesa Ridge feeling inspired to share my heart. That’s what this place does to me. It cracks open my steel-trap soul, and lets a little trickle out. You readers are the bystanders to the crash, you can look away if you want, but it’s also weirdly compelling. For me too, because I often read these missives back as if I’m watching from the outside.
So for right now, no heady descriptions of the animals or landscape, just honest reflection of where I am in this space and time.
Dad, I know you are with me in the morning clouds, wispy and curled, but mostly at night when the stars wink a knowing signal to me.
xx