There’s a place I love to walk. I discovered it at the beginning of the summer, when my daughters and I rented a little house in a different neighbourhood of the city than where we’d lived before. It’s a low-lying area along the Red River, ending where it meets the Seine River. It’s an area that’s frequently flooded in Spring when the rivers swell their banks. You can see the marks of past floods on the trunks of the trees that are rooted there.

I love this place because it feels liminal – a space between two realities. Sometimes it is solid land, sometimes it is part of the river, and sometimes it is covered in thick, gooey mud after the water has subsided. It’s special (and somewhat mystical) partly because I can only navigate it when Mother Nature gives me permission. Whenever it is wet, I have to walk a different path on higher ground.

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I was lying on a table and the practitioner holding my arm with both hands was saying “relax your muscles and let me move your arm for you”. With all of my will, I tried. I wanted to do what she asked, if only to make my inner people-pleaser happy. I wanted to be completely relaxed, trusting her to manoeuvre my arm the way she was trying to do it. But I couldn’t. I just COULD NOT. Every time she tried to move my arm, my muscles would involuntarily tighten, anticipate the movement she was trying to manage, and then help her do it. As much as my head told me she was trustworthy, my body refused to believe it. 

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I noticed his shoulder shaking hard from the news. My dear friend confessed to me, “My grandma passed away.” He asked me to give him a hug. “That was such a courageous and kind thing to ask at this moment,” I thought. I noticed how he held on to me, the sensation of grief came like waves through our bodies. I couldn’t help but hug him tightly. There was nothing that could be said that could relieve this moment. 

Loss is inevitable. Grief is inevitable, too. But we find it so hard to face grief. Some of us find it too strong to know how to let it out and…not to disturb others. Some of us find ourselves isolated by our own grief. 

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My social media feed is filling up with images of grinning college students settling into dorm rooms. Sometimes the parents who are posting those images are in the photos and grinning too, but beneath the grins and cheery captions… well, there’s a lifetime of stories and a whole host of other stuff. I can see it in their eyes. (Let’s face it, when your child moves away, it’s hard to keep it from showing up in your eyes.)

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There’s an older man I often encounter on the path when I go for my morning walks. We’ve become path-friends, always stopping for a brief interaction when we happen upon each other. Once, he showed me how the inside of his hat was falling apart, but “I just can’t bear to throw it away,” he said, tucking the broken bits in as he pulled the hat back onto his head. Another time he was laughing about the people he’d watched fishing unsuccessfully on the shore. “Just metres away,” he said, “the fish were leaping out of the water as if to taunt those with fishing rods.” The last time I saw him, he showed me a blurry photo he’d captured of a young eagle on a branch. “I’m glad he let me get so close,” he said, delight in his eyes. In turn, I told him about the two turtles I’d watched in a mating dance in the river a few weeks ago. “You’re so lucky!” he said. “You’re right,” I said. “I am lucky.”

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In the movie Don’t Look Up, two scientists (played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) try to convince the public that an astroid is about to hit and, unless some action is taken to mitigate the threat, the earth is about to be destroyed. They have little success in their urgent mission and, at the end of the movie (spoiler alert) there’s nothing more they can do so, as the astroid hurtles toward them, they sit down together with their friends and family to enjoy a final meal.

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Transcendent (adjective)  [tran(t)-ˈsen-dənt]: exceeding usual limits; extending or lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience; being beyond comprehension; a spiritual or religious state, or a condition of moving beyond physical needs and realities

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Every year at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, it happens at least once – I have a transcendent experience. It usually happens at one of the smaller stages, tucked away under the trees, while I’m listening to an intimate concert with a singer-songwriter. It’s a combination of things that align to bring together this exquisite moment – the cotton-ball clouds in the gentle blue sky, the towering pine trees, the poetry and emotion woven through the lyrics, the notes of the guitar, the tenderness of a receptive audience, the sun on my face.

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Krista is taking the month of July for some much-needed rest, but because Krista is a high-functioning person who is very good at GETTING STUFF DONE (she has, in the past, had seven part-time jobs at once, while raising children and running a church) and not very good at slowing down and letting other people get stuff done without her, she is resisting (and sometimes sending me belligerent texts as a result). I love her dearly, so I’m doing whatever I can to take things off her plate and guard the boundaries so that she can rest (just as she has done for me many times in our relationship), even if that means putting up with her snarkiness. (She’s only snarky because she knows I’m right!)

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I had good intensions of writing something light-hearted this week, in celebration of the beginning of summer and the launch of my new program, A Full-Bodied Life. The first lesson in that program is about embracing joy, so it seemed fitting to write something joyful. But then something hard happened, and those plans were set aside because it felt more important to write about this. Sometimes, that’s just the way life is. Sometimes the hard gets mixed in with the happy (which is all part of what I teach in A Full-Bodied Life). Maybe next week I’ll be back with something light-hearted.

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“Tell the truth to yourself,” sing the Avett Brothers, “and the rest will fall in place.”