Re-assembling My Soul

Looking back on your life can be a surreal exercise. I believe that even though we retain the same name and biography, we are not the same person from day to day, let alone decade to decade.

The ‘me’ of 20 years ago is not the same ‘me’ of today. Biologically, not one cell in my body is the same; they’ve all been replaced many times over. My day to day and minute to minute experiences have altered my outlook, behavior and reactions. My friends and co-workers and geography have changed. The things that interest me or take up my time are radically different and so how are we the same person throughout our lifetime?

My husband and I argue about this all the time. He looks at life as more of a long progression or a movie, whereas I see it as a bunch of snapshots or more of a photo album. When I look back, I see it as chunks of time that I often no longer relate to. Even if that chunk was in the recent past.

I’ve been struggling with our move from Colorado to Michigan over the past year and a half. I was drawn back to my home state for reasons that I could not explain at the time. Something compelled me to move back to a state  I hadn’t lived in for over 30 years. I didn’t question it, I just did it.

All was well for the most part, until a few devastating things happened, including the death of my dog and then, the sudden death of my 93 year-old father. Those two incidents made the already difficult transition of moving across the country, much more challenging. I longed for our life in Colorado, where Chili was still alive and my sweet daddy was a phone call away. I found myself pulling that ‘photo album’ off my mind’s shelf all of the time.

It didn’t help that my job was still in Colorado, so I was constantly reminded of what I was missing. I spoke to Denver every day on the radio and flew back for work fairly frequently. It was hard straddling two lives, while I was grieving so much. That’s one of the reasons I chose not to renew my contract when it expired last year. I had to live in one place and accept that my life was now on a beautiful 10-acre farm in northern Michigan.

So, I talked my husband into a ski trip to our former neighborhood. As we drove up Berthoud Pass into Fraser, Colorado, it felt as if I had never left. My exact quote was: “I feel like the last year and a half has been a dream and now I’m waking up to reality”. That’s how much I loved that segment of my life.

I’ve kept in contact with the folks who bought our house and we were able to pop in and spend some time visiting with them and my beloved house. She has offered to let us stay there when we visit, but I just wasn’t sure that I could handle that. Too hard. But, visiting with her and ‘my’ house was the most important part of the trip. That house is loved and cared for and I felt a huge wave of peace as we left.  All is as it should be.

We skied in beautiful conditions; there is no place on earth that makes me happier than a ski mountain and so this trip was therapeutic in ways that I never imagined. We snowshoed through the beautiful meadow behind our former home and I was able to soak in the images and energy of the mountains that I love. My happy place. The place where I left part of my soul.

So, that leads me to my next theory. All of those ‘photo albums’ that I mentioned earlier contain bits of our soul. We leave pieces of it as we travel our path and I guess our goal is to somehow call them all back at some point; to reassemble our souls as best we can by letting go of regrets and anger and bitterness. By being grateful for the people, places and experiences that have either chipped at our soul or filled it. We are a constant work in progress and we morph and grow and shrink and evolve, depending on the state of our soul.

I am so grateful for my time in Colorado because I know that for me, it’s a magical place, even though it took leaving to make me fully aware of how much I love it. I’m grateful that I can come back and visit and feel its familiarity. I also know that there were some very difficult times while I lived there and I must honor those challenges as well. It wasn’t perfect; no place or time in our lives is.

But, my soul is fuller after this trip. That part of my life is past and I’ve accepted it and embraced it. So, my message to you is to find your happy places and go there. Often. Whether in your mind’s eye or physically. You’ll find little pieces of your soul there.  Call them all back; it’s what makes us whole again.

Stream of consiousness….

I’m in a rut.  And you?  I guess we have to define it first and that might be tricky because I suspect that my rut ain’t the same as yours.  Mine might be partly due to where I live, which is in a small town in the Rocky Mountains, northwest of Denver.  It’s cold and snowy and during the winter, you feel pretty isolated from your neighbors.

This year, the snow has been sporadic, which isn’t optimal for a community that thrives on skiing and the visitors the ski resort brings in.  My husband and I usually ski several times a week, but this year the conditions have cut our outings considerably.  This equates to too much time in the house sitting and thinking.   Too much togetherness, too much time spent watching uninspiring TV.  I feel like I’m waiting for something, anything to happen.  A rut.

Some of my friends have advised me to move closer to ‘the city’, but I’m not sure that would solve my problem, which if I’m honest, is 80 percent internal.  I spend time in the city and although there is much more to do and the conveniences are a lot more….well, convenient, I suspect that city living can be just as rut-inducing as rural life.  Seems as if the typical city/suburb dweller spends an inordinate amount of time in their car, shuttling kids, commuting to and from work, running errands and that’s stressful and tedious.  The more stuff and conveniences you have around you, the more compelled you are to ‘run out for a few things’.  So, you can be in a sort of suspended animation with few choices or suspended animation with too many.  I’ll take the former for my rut.

I know this about myself: I need space and more importantly, I need nature; in large doses.  I can be impatient and I often demand instant gratification.  Nature enforces patience, solitude and to a certain extent, doing without certain conveniences (like Whole Foods or Bed, Bath and Beyond and worst of all, Target!).    As I write this, I’m looking out of the window at a snow covered meadow, where we routinely see foxes hunting and playing, mule deer grazing and occasionally a moose or two.  As I was driving early yesterday morning, I saw two beautiful snowshoe hares.  They’re so white in the winter that they are absolutely luminous.  Every time I see one, it takes my breath away. In the spring, they go back to a brownish-gray color and are impossible to spot.  Patience.

Spring takes forever to arrive at 9000 feet and so I’m perusing seed catalogs for a garden I won’t be able to plant until June (if nature cooperates) and we eyeball our firewood supply, hoping we won’t have to dig through 3 feet of snow for more.  We get the hummingbird feeders out in late April to have them ready for the arrival of our harbingers of summer, who show up every year, without fail, by the second week in May.  Patience.

Look, I know that for a lot of you, this is a foreign concept.  You’re happy and fulfilled and I envy you.  I know that I spend way too much time in my own brain; thinking, planning, worrying, plotting, ‘what iffing’, which is probably why I’m sitting and writing, when I could be out ‘doing stuff’ on a Saturday morning.  I require a lot of solitude to recharge my batteries, which can also begin to drive you a little crazy.

So, I guess it’s perfect timing that my husband is out of town for a few days because the effect has been a break in our routine.  I think that sometimes we have such symbiotic relationships among spouses, kids and maybe even co-workers, that we move in tandem.  We’re almost tied together with strings and we share habits, routines, comfort zones.  With him out of town, I feel free to move differently.  For instance, yesterday I listened to ‘my’ music most of the afternoon, without feeling like I was imposing on anyone else.  I grazed, instead of fixing a meal for both of us; I turned off the TV and went to bed with a book and read late into the night.  All things that I don’t do when living in symbiosis with my husband.

A minor shift in my universe and I feel less rutted today.  Better….and you?