My big boy is gone for the summer, this time until August and although the Hawaiian trip delayed the pain of longing, upon my return to Colorado and his empty room, my heart aches. Since he was four years old, I have practiced "saying good bye" and though the pain is duller now and I no longer pace his room, tears streaming down my face with the fierce longing of motherhood, for weeks on end. I miss him. His tender hearted presence and gentle energy. His slow smile and deep thinking. He is growing up and sometimes it feels like a string of goodbyes within a continuous stream of love so large that all our tears have room to fall.
Some days, you just have to forget about ‘healing’. You have to stop trying to feel better, trying to overcome your emotional wounds, or trying to be anywhere other than where you are. You have to embrace the day as it is. And you have to give yourself the most sacred permission of all: To shatter. To break. To be an ugly mess. To lean into a place of utter humility and powerlessness in yourself. To cry out to the heavens, “I can’t do this!” To admit utter defeat in the loss of the life you had imagined. To crumble to the ground, lonely and hopeless and profoundly ruined. To want to die, even. And there, in the darkest places, in the blackness of the underworld, you may begin to rediscover... life. And learn to love the beginnings. A sacred reboot: A single breath. The way the sun warms your face. The sound of a tiny bird singing in the tree over there. The raw simplicity of a single moment of human existence. Hell has been transmuted, thr...

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