Souvens et Mortis

On learning to dance, memory & death

THE MEADOW

In the lower field is a hidden meadow. Shielded by a circle of willows, a few boulders, rises and falls in the ground. It contains a spring and a grove of quaking aspen. I used to go there and make little fires to boil water for herbs and tea.

The hidden meadow is just a few strides wide, and there are always woodpeckers and flickers hammering on the dead willow snags, the rotten willow wood, the hollow fir near by. There are always hawks in the nearby trees.

I could hear the sound of the highway from there most days. But after a while, that constant sound lapsed into forgetfulness, and when the wind blew away from me I never heard it, and I heard instead the sound of the aspen leaves.

I don't know why I'm writing about the meadow, standing at an Ikea desk I just put together in the middle of downtown in a small canadian city. Maybe I miss my previous life already. I always like being able to pick the dry grass stems and use them to clean my teeth. And now I have to walk quite a ways to get to a patch of grass grown long and dry, in august when it all turns golden.

I drew two repeated hexagrams today that said to strip away all that is unnecessary, every distraction, every past pain, every old situation taking up space, everything that is no longer of use, all the things that are weighty and without solace, the things that carry a heaviness. For a long, long time a heaviness has laid on my heart. Probably years.

It turns out that because life is so hard sometimes, it's harder to live through without loving and being loved. I think a lot of what humans do—our artifice, our careers, our journeys, are an overlay on our need to love and be loved. And this loving is not a shallow, lust filled thing, but instead something mysterious, like how it feels to float between sleeping and waking in the warm sun.

And these moments are ones I find for myself, indeed I find them alone, and in places like the meadow. The challenge now, living in the angular concrete construction and hard surfaces, the heat of the city and all the people, is to not lose the sense of humanity I have built up slowly and delicately from all my years of being within nature.

My chest aches from time to time, with thoughts of my previous lives, of love and care, of the chance to love another, and to be loved, and life feels sometimes hard and lonely without that. But I have found it again and again right where I find so many things: in the everyday interactions with random happenstance out in the world, with the trees and grasses I can get to, the oceanside and driftwood heaps, sharing a smile with a stranger, a word with a cashier.

I have been dancing a lot, as much as I can really, dancing when I run, dancing in public, dancing in parking lots, on the ferry, in my condo, in the parks, on the streets and crossing the roads. I'll break out into dance to see my reflection in a coffeeshop window and wonder what the people inside think of, seeing this person dancing. I am trying to get better at dancing, and I feel like when I dance really hard to music I love, it is clearing out the pain that comes and goes.

Dancing and movement seem to be a solution for clearing out inevitable heartache and pain that dwells inside of us as life passes by.

So I dance alone and like no one is watching, I dance to the trees, to the streets, for the meadow, for the sage grouse I saw this spring dancing on their leks in the great basin—I dance crossing the street in the crosswalk, I smile at children and dogs and speak softly to them, I eat ice cream once a week and run almost every day, and I dance and even sing sometimes when I am alone, songs that came to me from the wild places I have traversed, and cherished, and known.

I don't have any answers though, and I told a group of friends not long ago that I think I understand about 3/100 in terms of life itself. I used to think I was at 50%. But I have been so seriously humbled and brought down to my bones. I feel like all I know is the following:

The life I have and the days I live are all that is meant for me.

There is no other life, no other person or people, no other experience that would be better for me. This is the life I have and the people, and the place I'm in and the family and moment I was born into. And I am going to live it as well as I can, with as much heart as I can, and dance as much as I can as I pass my awkward way through it, making mistakes along the way, but smiling when I can, at the people, the trees, the passing cars and the families.

I love everyone who has supported me and even those who have hated and degraded me, those who have hurt me, because everything serves a purpose of refining, at the same time both sharpening and softening, as life passes by—and I live forward towards a full content heart, that can be somewhat like that little grove of aspens in the quiet meadow in that field—a place few know to go, but those that do are filled with a silent kind of joy that comes freely out from their eyes and hands, building beautiful things in the world, caring for it and loving ourselves and those we are lucky to have and to know.

Thank you for reading or listening.

Please take care of yourself,

and be and know, and be known

love and release,

memory, despair

souvens, et mortis.