natural | nat • u • ral

1. being such by birth or by nature

2. being part of the innermost nature of a person

3. being such as found in nature and not altered by processing or refining

4. existing without human habitation or cultivation

5. free from any intent to deceive or impress others

When I chose my WORD for 2019, I didn’t anticipate the tender layers that would have to be stripped from me to reveal my most “natural” self.

(Be careful what you wish for!)

I wanted to feel “free.” I wanted to exist as wholly and purely myself as possible. I wanted to live truthfully, but as it turned out, my “truth” involved a lot of loss, unresolved grief, and generational trauma.

It Starts With a Dream

It started in December, 2018. Really, it started a lifetime ago, somewhere in the crossing of my arrival and his departure. A daughter and father, reaching indefinitely for one another, across spiritual plains, “over the hills and far away.”

“Threads that are golden don't break easily.”

Yes, our reaching towards one another started there, in life and death, but it was in December that he came to me in a dream. He was playing a song for me.

When I awoke, he was still with me. For the first time in my life, I felt the presence of my father.

Swan Medicine

“Swan ushers in a time of altered states of awareness and of development of your intuitive abilities. Swan medicine people have the ability to see the future, to surrender to the power of Great Spirit, and to accept the healing and transformation of their lives.

“Swan is telling you to accept your ability to know what lies ahead. If you are resisting your self-transformation, relax; it will be easier if you go with the flow. Stop denying that you know who is calling when the phone rings. Pay attention to your hunches and your gut knowledge, and honor your female intuitive side.”

On January 1st, 2019, seeking guidance in the new year, I pulled a medicine card: Swan. I couldn’t foresee the details of the year that was beginning to unfold that day, but I could feel the significance of my journey. My father was with me. His presence had a momentum about it, urgent, almost desperate. I was receiving messages from my great-grandmother, who had been dead for over a decade. Hearing from spirits was not new or strange to me, but this felt pressing. Inescapable. Inevitable.

“Accept the healing and transformation of your life.”

“Yes,” I promised.

Bones

From my journal, 1/20/19—

“Super Blood Wolf Moon + Lunar Eclipse today.

I can hardly hold this pen. My body is weak from the energy passing through me. The tears, the grief, the loneliness.

The indomitable pain of loss.

How can I miss someone I’ve never known?

I can miss him because I am an extension of him, like the branches or leaves of a tree. Only, if I am the branches, I have no roots. If I am a flower, I am ripped from my stem, deprived of my water source, but expected still, somehow to bloom.

I thirst for him. Desperately parched. Desperate.

*

Yesterday my mother and I went to the cemetery. Green Hills Memorial. We found Resurrection Slope, and went searching for his grave. It took time. We wandered, baking under an unnaturally hot January sun.

When we found the grave, I stood looking down at it for a long time, simultaneously numb and overwhelmed. I hated having to see it. I resented having to face it, this, the only material fact of him. I tried not to imagine his bones, hollow and rotted in the soil beneath my feet. How long do bones last? How long, the loneliness of loss?

But aren’t I a material fact of him? Aren’t I proof of his once magnificent and virile flesh and blood? I want to find myself at peace with that. I want that to feel like enough. And one day, maybe it will. For today though, I am grieving.

Let it pass through…

Let it pass.

A Miracle

A couple days after the cemetery, my father’s old girlfriend contacted me.

Would you like to have his baseball glove, she wrote.

His pen and pencil set, she wrote.

I also have a cassette tape of him reciting a poem. I don’t know why I never thought of giving you these things, but they should be with you.

•

Less than a week later, the package arrived. I pulled each item out, one at a time, like a child who has discovered a mysterious box of treasure, and must investigate each piece thoroughly, in search of important clues.

Poetry, written by his hand. He was a writer.

Sketches, drawn with carelessness and skill, simultaneously. He was an artist.

A recording of him singing a song he was writing. He sang.

•

He had recorded his voice, and his voice lived on, so that some day, when his daughter was ready, he could remind his sweet friend of the box of treasure she’d been saving for so long—who knows why we keep the things we keep?— and when his daughter cried out to hear from him, he would find a way for her to hear his voice, and to know for sure.

It was him.

Ghosts Passing Through

What followed were months of physical and emotional breakdown. The day after visiting my father’s grave, I awoke with a terrible rash across my back. Over the next few weeks, it spread over my entire body. In order to hide it, I wore long sleeves and turtle necks, but all that coverage didn’t alleviate the discomfort and self-consciousness. The rash lasted for nearly two months, before finally fading away, just as inexplicably as it had appeared. In the meantime, I also stopped getting my period and started losing my hair. A negative pregnancy test was both a relief and a worry—if not that, then what? By March, I was truly concerned, and had extensive blood work done.

“Everything looks totally normal. Just stress.”

If only this was “just stress,” I thought. The truth was, I felt like pulp. Wrung out and squeezed dry, like the wadded up remains of over-ripe fruit. I worried that it was finally happening—that whatever demon had taken hold of my father’s mind was finally getting her claws in mine.

“Is this the story of how I lose my mind?” I asked in the silent darkness of my bedroom. I would lay in bed for days at a time, hiding under the covers, crying and trying to breathe. Nathan would bring food to me, otherwise I would forget to eat.

Nathan, my sweet and steady witness—the only one who knew and saw it all. He watched me dissolving, and did not look away in fear. He never took his eyes from me.

This is the most accurate definition of love—to love someone so deeply that even their darkness cannot frighten you away.

His confident and watchful gaze made me feel like there was hope for me, yet. If he doesn’t have to look away, it cannot be too bad, I told myself.

Flowers and Flames

In April, we went to Paris. I wanted to see the cherry blossoms in bloom, and indeed, I did.

I also stood on the edge of the Seine, and watched Notre Dame burn. 800 years of art and prayers, in flames.

This is what it feels like in my body and my heart, I thought. The container of my life is on fire.

I sobbed as a choir of children sang hymns and prayers beside me. They were not looking away from the devastating flames. No. And neither were they crying. Instead, they were accepting the truth, that this beautiful monument was crumbling down, and they were raising their sweet voices in a unified, hopeful blessing.

Is this what faith sounds like? I wondered. Is this what it looks like to “accept the healing and transformation of your life”?

Can I sing, even as the tender layers of my life burn away?

*

I did not want to leave Paris. It felt unnatural to leave a place that seemed to understand what to do with pain and loss. Paris did not turn her face. Paris could hold me and my broken heart. Paris could make me feel less alone. Paris felt like my true home.

I cried quietly throughout the flight back to California. I wasn’t ready to return to a culture where I felt I had to pretend that I was okay.

You’d be surprised how few people are able to witness your pain without having to avert their eyes.

You’d be surprised how many people can ignore the flames burning down the cathedral in the middle of your city.

Daughterhood

Less than two weeks after returning from Paris, I got in a car with my mom and drove to New Mexico to visit her mother, my grandmother, who I hadn’t seen for over 10 years. Reuniting with my grandmother was comforting and sweet, but it was also emotionally exhausting. It was hard to watch my mom immediately revert into her little girl self in her mother’s home. I was acutely aware of the way she would cower and flinch like a wounded faun every time her mother spoke to her. It was exactly this kind of scene that had caused me to recoil from my mom’s family, so many years ago.

Is there a more devastating thing to witness than your mother’s pain? I’d spent my entire life trying to alleviate my mother’s sadness. I wanted to stand in front of her to soften the blows as they fell. I chose to take up arms against any person or thing who would try to hurt her. I, the warrior daughter, had heavily armored myself, and was ready to fight.

Always.

But things were different now. I’d arrived in New Mexico soft and armorless—perhaps I’d arrived in my most natural state.

I was ready to reunite myself with my family.

I realized that in order to do that, I needed to separate my relationship with my grandmother from my mother’s relationship with her mother. Just as I was the only person who could revive the relationship between my grandmother and I, so was it my mother’s task to bridge the divide that kept her mother from her. I’d been carrying my mother’s pain with me for a very long time, a heavy and splintered grudge. In New Mexico, I laid it down and let it burn.

I understood that in order to heal my own life, I had to give up trying to protect everyone else’s.

A Series of Events

I returned home from New Mexico in an emotional blackout. In only a few months, I’d faced and processed an overwhelming expanse of family and personal trauma. My heart was raw and my body was exhausted. I felt terribly lonely and alienated from everyone around me. No one, not even Nathan, knew the extent of what I was processing, because I still didn’t know how to articulate it. Friends were having babies, hosting showers, having play dates, and I was expected to show up for it all. It seemed like the healthy thing to do. “Keep showing up for life,” I repeated to myself. After all, if I was lonely, shouldn’t I welcome all opportunities not to be alone? But it felt lonelier to be surrounded by people I loved, knowing they had no idea what I was going through. They didn’t know that my body was slowly shutting down. I was still losing my hair, and my period continued to keep me in irregular suspense every month. They didn’t know that my childhood friend, Erin, had been placed in hospice care after battling a rare form of cancer for over a year. They didn’t know that Erin, my friend, was going to die. They didn’t know that I was hiding in my bed, crying, for hours at a time, or that I was listening to the recording of my father’s voice over and over and over every day.

Yes, the list of things unknown by the people I most loved continued to grow.

This is the most accurate definition of loneliness. I felt it acutely.

What I wanted and needed was an indefinite period of time to rest and recuperate. What I got instead was more life, and it came for me at an increasingly accelerated pace.

On July 9th, Maty died. Losing my teacher felt like being cut loose from a firmly grounded anchor in the eye of a storm. I was a ravaged ship, immediately lost at sea, drowning beneath wild, pounding waves. Or perhaps I was a tree, pulled up at the roots by the swift force of a tornado, weightlessly spiraling in a twister. Or even more likely, I was a small, brittle leaf, easily plucked from its branch, whipping lightly, helplessly in the breeze.

My birthday came a week later, and passed terribly. I was mourning the loss of my teacher’s life, and found it a cruel joke to be expected to celebrate my own. A strange misunderstanding with friends over birthday events led to the shattering of my already fragile porcelain heart. Perhaps the misunderstanding would not have happened if I’d known how to communicate the state of my life in that moment. By now, however, I was too weak to speak about it. I hid further under the covers and blacked out on my own tears.

Thus, July and August passed.

Vitamin Sea

In September, the sun came out, and so did I. I crawled my little crab self out of bed and onto the sand, under the sun, into the salt water. I stayed there for months, quietly and alone, allowing the sun and salt to do their work.

And they did their work, indeed. By the time Erin died, in November, I was strong enough to hear the news and remain standing.

I was Notre Dame, steeple collapsed, innards in ashes. Still, my facade stood strong.

“She will be restored,” they say.

Accept the Healing and Transformation of Your Life

There’s that saying, “the only way out is through.” I’ve spent 2019 letting a lot of pain pass through me. It’s been hard. I had no idea how heavy the sadness was until it started draining out and away from me.

The ghosts have come and gone. I’ve set them and myself free by allowing them to pass through.

Is it over? I don’t know. Can you tell me if any kindling remains in the cathedral?

What I do know is that I am a braver, freer, and more beautiful woman for having continued to show up for life this year, even as it burned me to ashes.

I did not look away.

And I never stopped singing.