My Dear Friends,
We are soft-bellied things that like our neat endings, our definite middles, and our celebratory finish lines.
We like to know where we are on this healing journey. If we don’t, does it count? If we don’t, how will we know when we have arrived?
From my lived experience, I have come to see that we are always moving through the grey. Always in motion, we are liminality itself, living thresholds, always in a state of becoming something else, never arriving, only sometimes resting in places that carry our bodies onward for us.
This is frustrating. Or can be, if you have expectations that go against the natural grain of life.
Take a moment to look around you, and inside of you, dear friend. “You might not know where you are, but the forest knows, the raven knows, the moss knows” - is something I refer to often. It means that it doesn’t matter where you think you are on this path (be that a path of finding yourself, of healing, of relationships, of success) because Something Else does. And that Something Else offers us a different kind of direction in our wayfaring.
It knows that you are the destination you seek.
It knows that it really doesn’t matter where you are right now, but that it matters enormously who you are right now.
You are not lost in this messy mess of a wilderness called life. You are exactly who you need to be and everything is unfolding in a timely manner just for you. That feeling of being lost is a part of the lie you were sold at the forest school’s orientation, along with a map and destination of a place, not of your own.
You came here with a heart as a compass and an inbuilt psychological first aid kit. You came here to wonder, not to find anything. Not to dig up ruins or build houses. You came here to wonder, not to find anything. You came here to let life and her edible beauty feed your curiosity and leave you satiated.
But how can you trust this when you’re hurting?