#2 The Endeavor
It all starts with a plan.
For whatever reason a plan helps me move forward. It provides structure and a goal, even purpose. I began wondering why, if I could plan an unknown trip to a foreign land that seemed to scare most people, then why could I not jump into the unknown land of the world beyond grief? Why could I not figure out how to journey without a plan? Because that just isn’t me. I like maps, I like imagining paths, even if the journey is transformed along the way.
Talking with my friend who knows grief allowed me room to formulate a plan. I was going to spend two months back in Asia again. What could I do with those two months that would at least help me move forward in my desire to begin better integrating my grief.
First, I needed to recognize the thinking that I hold fast to in life. My belief systems:
Every child deserves to be protected even if that child isn’t mine.
Blue is the most interesting color.
It’s worthwhile to do nothing but listen to the wind and watch the ocean and the trees.
Making is a way of knowing and the process of making is more important than the image or object.
Living in relation to the nonhuman parts of the world is life affirming.
Part of being genuinely connected with people is being with them where their wounds lie.
There is nothing more valuable than taking time to be present with someone else in their moment.
My son deserves better than what circumstances have given him.
Joy, beauty, and abundance are best shared.
There is absolutely nothing better than being in relation to water.
Genuine, non-manipulative love is possible.
Then I took the raw materials that my friend had let me borrow from her accumulated wisdom and I began to craft them into something.
Grief is rooted, not in the mind, but in the body. Grief, at times, is incomprehensible, but the body knows.
Grieving is a social act. Pain that is shared is more pliable and less fixed.
Ritual is how millennia worth of humans have processed their grief.
Solitude can help, solitude can kill.
Time will not fix grief, but time will change grief and help it find a place, a home in our bodies.
I decided that I would give myself a project—a four-month project. I had a month before I would leave the country. I would be spending a month in Nepal climbing from 2-10,000 feet to a high mountain plateau and back down. Then a month in Southeast Asia and a month at home in December. I would give myself a 4-month span of time to try to actively grieve and transform my pain into something else other than this fog bound darkness. What I would do at the end of 4 months I did not know, but I at least had a glimmer of hope for the next four months.