You’re not the first to admit guiltily to me that you’re taking some time off for a personal journey. I hear the shame in your voice and I imagine you’ve lain awake for many nights wondering if it’s really happening, or how long it will continue, or if some part of you has broken or died—and so I suppose you might be surprised by my reaction.
Go! (I’m squealing here!) Why are you still here? Take that trip! Touch the earth! Rest in its embrace! Remember what we’re fighting for! All that ‘self-care’ blabber isn’t just about keeping yourself from getting burnt out; it’s also about making yourself strong. And soft.
Go soften. Stare off without thoughts. Watch a slug move across the forest floor. Or contemplate all those thoughts in your head at once—while staring at the Milky Way. Peel the layers from whatever it is that you seek, turn it over and over like a hermit crab spinning a pebble until you see just exactly how, or if, it serves you. Cast aside the ones that don’t, and don’t feel guilty for lost time in sifting. It’s the sifting that brings the kernels to the surface.
And don’t rush back in a panic. Sit for a while with those with less privilege, but who still think the same thoughts and feel the same grief as you. Sit in powerlessness with them. Don’t offer solutions. Listen, observe. Feel. Learn how they get through it, how they keep living. And laughing. Let your mind grow. Explore those parts of your body whose aching keeps you up at night and stretch them. Do the same with your heart.
I know you’re not running away. I know you know we can’t run away. We walk upon this earth now as keepers of memory of the time before, and what we each do now becomes all the more important. Becoming strong, becoming soft, learning and unlearning—it all takes time, I know, but there are more of us than we let ourselves believe and the shifts will continue to be filled. We must trust that the seeds that have been cast in all directions have sprouted and grown, or risk finding out that they haven’t in order to learn why not.
Remember that most of a tree’s energy goes into what’s happening below the earth, into nurturing the roots that weave into entire forests and that those forests, too, are but small parts of the even larger organism, all connected underground despite everything else going on above. Remember how we met, probably locked to a tripod or lawn chair or to each other, and often without even knowing each other’s real names, or what jobs we did, or where we grew up—because our hearts met each other before our identities caught up. All that temporal shit and any differences amongst us were surpassed by the knowledge that we shared a love for this earth so deep that it drove us to madness—and to each other. We came together as forests and children do, and built amazing things together, so many things.
And now we’re at the beginning of something new. Whether it’s a future we wish to embrace or not, there remains always the potential for change (isn’t that the curse of it all?) and we will need to be rested, healed and brave. We will need new experiences and memories to guide us forward in new ways, and new stories to tell those who are still growing tall even in the shadows. So, go. Rest, explore, dig, weave your roots, do the shadow work, or just laugh with abandon long enough to remember that you’re alive. Go back to those places that first taught you how to live, or to those daydream-places whose calling of “one day” has kept the grief at bay for this many years. Touch them, smell them, taste them. Cry. Scream. Laugh. Dance. Be a child on this earth again, so small and still growing.
I know that you’ll be back, that you’ll continue to bring healing to this earth in whatever way makes sense for you—because it’s impossible to separate from your very being, isn’t it?
Jess Lee
JESS LEEis an environmental & community advocate drawn to borders, ecotones, and the shadows between the lines. She was raised in the forests of Appalachia and lived for many years in Mexico, Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest. Her short stories and essays have been published in Cutthroat, Burnt Pine, The Humanist and Z Magazine.