A spiritual walk with grief in some ways is, and in some ways is not, like these paths. A walk with grief, especially at the beginning, is more like being totally off the grid, mucking around, with no discernible path at all.
Here are some of my favorite ways that I’ve kept going–what I’ve done to keep myself occupied, reflections on my best and hardest moments, and what I hope to carry with me into next year when we emerge into another new reality…
As the election season has dragged on this autumn, I’ve found myself falling back in time to that time four years ago when the wheels of change were starting into motion for me. The actual week of the election I was still trying to juggle my full-time job as the managing director of a dance company while also conducting a storytelling residency at Virginia Tech.
I would never buy a bottle of water.
Many people who know and love me recognize that I have this kind of extreme hangup about environmental waste, carry my own water bottle pretty much everywhere. Given that water in this country is often free and clean, I always wonder why more people don’t insist on doing the same. The answer, of course, is that we’ve been marketed out of understanding and believing it.
A single gal who lives alone, I listen to a lot of podcasts. They fill up my days, and my ears. I started to have a little fantasy that each of my walks was its own episode of a super niche podcast. Each walking buddy was my co-host, sidekick, guest, and micro-audience all at the same time…
On their first date, my grandfather nearly made a drastic mistake, telling an off-color joke about squirrels to my grandmother. Even though she was quite the prude, she chose to look past his Navy boy ways and focus on the handsome blue eyes. Thank goodness, and probably thanks in no small part to my grandfather, she loosened up over time.