Becoming my own primary relationship

I watch the couples, the families I know, and see how decisions are colored by what they know "the other" needs, wants ...  It doesn't mean that folks can't be selfish but they do it within the magnetic field of the other.
Since late adolescence I've had a true north through my felt sense of my sibs', or my husband or my kids'   needs.  It was grounding, and simplified decision making.  All I did had those boundaries.      
And now I am in free fall;  my first responsibility now is my own well being.  It's like how on our first anniversary Gil told me "We should move out into the country because you need it to keep your soul moist, and as long as it's a half hour from restaurants and movies, I'll be good".   Now I need to do that for myself.  Do I want to still live in the country? Do I want to live with or nearer other people? Do I want to travel?   How best to take care of this body that I find myself with, with all it's weak links and fissures?   How odd.  I really hadn't noticed it much before.     I am me and this is my life; what I do makes a difference.
So what is my true north now?  A lot of solitude and silence and ruminating, puttering, slowly getting on top of organizing tools and weeding/mowing.   It feels soothing, like I'm being responsible in a way I was only half assed before.  How to be the best possible iteration of me?   Trying a little more, a little different and noticing how I feel, am I flourishing or drying up.    And noticing the world around me; I am touched by the news but more deeply moved by the struggles of friends and folks I see.  I'm coming to some peace, acceptance, we are a civilization in decline, as I am an individual in one sort of decline too.  Somehow saying it, my expectations are reduced and I delight in smaller signs of life.      
I am learning.       How to say "no, that doesn't work for me" to say "I can handle this or that, but radio silence, not telling me what's going on, I'm not willing to put up with that".     There is nobody else to turn to.  It's up to me  to take care of, to optimize, to revel in      me.

Poetry helps

I said that years ago during the height of a crisis in response to someone's desire to help.  "Find me a poem which helps articulate my inner experience", and some pressure is relieved, some oxygen added, a recognition of "yes".  This one does that for me.  It's what this waiting time has felt like.

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale 
by Dan Albergotti

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

I am hearing "the sound of gears and moving water"; things are moving.

Soil

When Gil and I bought this land 24 years ago, it was abused land.  The ridge top had been corned and Atrezined to death and erosion had finished the job. On the spine of the ridge there was mostly rocky gravel, very little top soil.   24 years of burning and mowing and just letting the switch grass roots and all the other life forms melt into organic matter which holds and builds  soil, has done it's job.
We did a prairie burn a week or so ago.  There had been a rain 3 days before but conditions had been very dry.   And yet, three days after the rain, there were tire tracks with standing water in them on the spine of the ridge.  There was enough organic matter to hold the moisture, to be resilient even if this is a drought year.

I feel like I've grown that resilience too.  Something is shifting in me, not sure what, but I am feeling the depth of my top soil, and it is holding moisture.   Tonight is a magic moment, there's green stubble showing through the blackened field out the ridge surrounded by apple family in full blossom.  I'm drunk on birds and blossoms.  I'm planting my garden and the coffee grounds and manure/hay of the last few years has deliciously decomposed; it's going to be a good garden this year I hope.  And it looks like the Gil tree is making it; there are new leaves opening.
Resilience and the power of soil, composting life into life.

Chimes, three years, still ringing

I've been listening to the recording Chris made Easter morning three years ago of the wind chimes on our porch, the chickadees, our rooster crowing and Gil's brother Bob whispering "how beautiful it is, and it keeps on going forever".  He was referring to the after tone of the chimes, but it comforts me that that was what Gil heard again and again that last hour or so before he let go into the beauty going on forever.
I've been randomly weepy today, unlike the last two anniversaries of his death.  This one feels different, as though I am letting go in a way I hadn't before.  I'm hearing the chimes and the birds in my life now, especially the cranes, as a beauty that rings and resonates through deep layers of my dreams and the air I breathe.     I miss him.    and he is still resonanting in me.   I taste food, feel music, indulge in sensuality as I learned with him.   His resonance is beautiful,  and it keeps on going, quieter, fainter, deeper,    forever.

Shifting

Something is afoot.  Not sure what but there's a wild rumpus going on in the backroom of my mind! I'm dreaming a lot.   And had one odd night of real insomnia.  I can begin to imagine what Gil struggled with at night.  I traveled cross country twice in a month and a half  and came back with new eyes. With the grace of friends I had put in new flooring and painted my bedroom, transformed  it, created a private beautiful space which alters my sense of the world each time I wake.  

I came home to a portable sawmill ready to transform the snapped and uprooted trees of last June's tornado into beautiful quarter sawn oak and cherry and walnut and locust boards.  Two days of hard work and the trauma of the tornado was released into potential of woodworking furniture making.  I'm exhausted but I can feel, I think I'm starting to wake up.  How scary is that?

Three Easter's ago Gil died.  Just three? it feels like ten, or just a whole other lifetime.  I found some pictures of Gil that I really like, had them printed up and find myself conversing with them from time to time.  His presence in my heart has settled down into an amalgam of the Gil I first knew and how he evolved.  But he is no longer omnipresent.  It makes me sad to write that, realize that. I visit with him every now and then, but it's happened, finally, I am living at the center of my own life.

What's happening? Where is this energy coming from? Am I in danger of taking on too much and losing my quiet center?   Because of the late snow/cold the trees haven't really even  budded out though the bluebirds have been back for a while arguing about who gets the nest box out front to rear their young in.   I'm watching the slow motion rising of the sap, the hum is beginning and I am shifting into whatever is next.   I just don't know  what it is.

The Season of March

We're heading into my favorite time of year. Emerging from the hunkered down posture of Winter, I feel like I can see the deep bone structure of the land, of my life.  The green hum of the sap rising is beginning, and I feel flooded with possibilities, projects, births, new routines, a shift in awareness.

I still feel so little energy or desire to "do" much of anything but I've had a couple of good days of late, where I felt the silt settle and a little more clarity and agency flow through my body.  Just a little. As I walk the goat fence, I realize how far I and the farm came last year.  We are in far better shape to fall in love with some idea or project and make it happen.    And no deaths this winter! Though I haven't checked the bees yet, they may not have made it.  But I did, despite    a lot.  I wonder if the strong woman I used to be is lying dormant, giving my wispier self time to satiate on silence and sleep and all other indulgences and becoming ready to "pull up my socks" and start using this life I've been given , to live?   I feel that strength in my bones but not in my stomach yet.
Gently, gently, it's coming, no rush.            
I want to feel my own sap rising!

Noticing

Sometimes I feel a little guilty, it's been almost three years since Gil's death and I still haven't reentered the fray, so to speak.  I say I'm still working on deferred maintenance of my body, soul, home and farm, but is that enough?  Shouldn't I be reengaging with friends, giving back to the world from the gifts I've been given, "getting over it" as a friend asked me?

I don't know,  and that's the simple truth.

I relish not knowing, not being sure, open to the odd syncronicities, not sure what to make of it all.  I like noticing things, little things, like tracks in the snow which I can only guess at their origins.

I am a noticer.   I remember walking in the Arboretum when Gil and I were first together and noticing this and that and his saying "You think too much".  My noticing is not thinking so much as it is being open.  Some of it may be trying to figure out cause and effect , like my recent epiphany about freezing radiant floor tubes, but mostly it's just being aware of what weather front is blowing though my soul, what I am drawn toward, what away from.  I hear people, some close, some far, in pain or crisis, and I nod, I bear witness to how hard it is to be alive, and to be growing up, always being challenged with more.  I know that feeling.  I watch my goats, two older and bigger, two younger and smaller deal with hay and shelter, my sibs and I as we deal with our relative positions to our past.  I don't know what it all means, but I notice it.

Perhaps the blessing I have of time, time without pressure to earn a living, or care for a spouse of kids, perhaps that blessing is time to just be.  It may not be forever, I suspect I will be seduced into a cause or a project, a relationship or (heaven forbid) a crisis and reengage with gusto, but not now. Now may be the time to simply notice being alive, how good it feels to breathe, how beautiful the sky is, how the sun rises and the moon sets and the snow falls, bearing witness by not knowing, simply noticing.

Be singing

There is a Rilke quote which has been haunting me for the last few months.
"Spirit wants only that there be singing, as to who does it, in that He has only a passing interest".
I went to silence last year because I wanted to hear the silent stirrings of my new born solo self and find out what I wanted.  And I have, to a degree. But I've not been singing my solo sweet ruminating song out loud for the world, and so also then for me, to hear.  I have this one life, this one set of skills, gifts, accidents of the chemical interaction of genes and experience.  Time to sing it out loud again, so I can hear it, learn more about who I am from what comes out of me.

It's been a year. I've crept through my "deferred maintenance  of body, soul, home and farm".  The farm was hit by the tail end of twin tornadoes, odd spots of trees with their "undies in a bundle". The big hickories below the barn, snapped in half, trees uprooted in the front yard and almost all the big oaks on the rock outcropping taken down.  The Gil tree was crushed by two of them; half of it broke, half bent.  By some miracle, with "splints" and other stabilizers, it seems to still live.  And the house untouched.  Neighbors emerged with tremendous help, and the beat went on.
I saw a wolf,
a powerful experience.  The dogs were barking. I saw the rump running down hill; it had been fairly close to the house. It stopped and turned sideways, looking up at the dogs, the house, me.  It scratched, marked the ground, 6, 7, 8 times.  "Set boundaries" it told me, mark your territory, stand up for what you need and what you will not tolerate, do not give away who you are for the comfort of   dogs.
The Universe stills sings for me, even in my silence.  My chickens, goats, dogs still have much to teach me.  I watch the sunrise, remember my dreams, wonder if I should be more engaged with the outside world, and am open.  I don't know,   what's next, what's right, what I "should" or not do.  I trust my gut, who do I want to spend time with, who not? I speak what I know which seems less and less.  Yet there is this sense that my foundation is becoming firmer, that some silt of who I am is settling down and forming something I will be able to stand on.
I have no idea if anyone is reading this blog anymore; I don't need to know.  But if you are, know that you are the ear of the Universe for me. You are whom I speak to as I attempt to "be singing".