Indelible Sensations of Living

(with tiny flowers that float beside me)

It had been a discouraging week and I felt that this might be how a sugar maple tree feels after being sapped. It was only Thursday but I couldn’t stand to wait until Friday for date night. We went for happy hour at our favorite place and while we sipped on cream ale and pale lager we talked for hours about all of the hard things. There were no answers that arrived, nothing that was solved, yet somehow just the talk of the things made my shoulders feel lighter.

We stayed there chatting later than usual in an effort to avoid reality just a bit longer, as though a bubble of protection was surrounding us on those stiff bar stools. I pretended it could be this way forever. We came home and made love in the back of his truck before we went inside to put the kids to bed.

In place of our usual white noise that night we fell asleep to indie music. Ben Howard sang ‘Old Pine’ softly on the speaker beside our bed and while my heavy eyelids began to close, the song transported me back to a Banff Canada trip we took some years ago.

It wasn’t just that I could see it, I could feel the memory in me somehow. I could feel us hiking beneath thick pines, grilling dinners next to a rushing river of crystal clear ice, relaxing in a hot tub surrounded by the tallest jagged mountain-tops I’d ever laid eyes on. My heart tugged and throbbed beneath my rib cage while I thought about how cruel time was, how much I missed the past already and how quickly it had left me in the dust. It’s ironic, isn’t it? I move forward while the memories stay behind, yet somehow it feels the opposite.

I woke in the morning to the birds singing outside of our window. The heaviness in my heart had settled back overnight, but I was learning to hold it now. It made me walk slower, yet somehow made me more present. A burden and a blessing. I poured a cup of coffee and while it warmed my throat and chest, I stood in the window watching the red-breasted finches and yellow warblers take turns pecking seeds from our bird feeder.

I shoved carrots in my jacket pocket and stopped to pick handfuls of damp dandelions on my way to say good morning to the bunnies. I opened the coop and while the hens raced to pick up the morning worms my pocket, still cold from the carrots, was replaced with a handful of fresh eggs that I would crack for breakfast, over easy in the skillet with chopped tomatoes and mushrooms.

The morning quiet broke like a truck driving down an empty road as everyone in the house began to wake. I stood at the frying pan in our kitchen, feeling more like an anchor at sea than a human being, and I thought about something I learned once watching Cesar Romano on Netflix. When walking the dogs he trained he talked about this concept of how the emotions you’re feeling will flow through the leash and into the dog. If you feel anxiety, Cesar says, they will feel anxiety and react accordingly. 

I’m not so cavalier as to say that my family are on leashes but perhaps, rather, we are all connected evenly through ropes or strings. It feels like somehow my emotions travel through those ropes and become the emotions that we all carry as a family unit. Especially when it’s pain or hurt or exhaustion. Sometimes it feels that we Moms can’t have a bad day or a bad week alone as an individual because it brings the whole house down with us.

Sometimes I have to smile simply so that my house becomes whole again. Ultimately, it seems to be another lesson in staying present. In choosing one path or the other. In forcing me to climb outside of myself. I kissed the boys on their heads and put some bread in the toaster.

This is the path I chose.

Yesterday evening as I soaked in the hot tub I stumbled on a new meditation that I decided to try called “NLP re-framing”. This stands for “Neuro Linguistic Programming” and essentially, they say, it’s a way to change your thoughts.

While I relaxed in the hot water beneath the trees and a partly cloudy sky, a thick soothing voice walked me through the meditation. First we focused on how hard this current situation felt, what it felt like, how big it felt, how I would describe the hurt in words. Then, after visualizing and feeling and putting it all into words, the next part came: we took control of the pain by choosing to make it something else entirely. 

In the end, through the power of visualization, the heaviness that had been so big and all-consuming morphed into a tiny green flower floating in the water next to me. Whenever it surfaces, I’m to picture the flower floating beside me. I’m to take this big seemingly unsolvable hurt and remember that it’s actually the lightest and least harmful object imaginable.

It all felt too easy, yet…it worked. 

Could it be so simple?

I am floating through my days with tiny flowers beside me.

They remind me that life is not meant to be linear.

And I will not take them with me when I go.