Stumbling Seer

Here’s the Key: Just Moving Toward Home for the Holidays

These are the basic tenets of managing the year end holidays while grieving.

1. It’s O.K. to still grieve.
2. It is imperative to practice “holding complicated feelings simultaneously.”

I’ve just read a well written article in Elephant Journal (a mindful e-publication) that I found personally helpful in my own facing of these end-of-year holy-days with a heavy heart. Lynn Shattuck uses the usual steps to surviving the holidays. The reason Shattuck struck a cord with her readers here is that she told her own story. So,

3. Tell your story and listen lots to others’ stories.

But #2 is the most important life skill for self care at any time. Ambivalence is the key.

When I was in graduate school, single, young and driving a very basic Mazda, I drove 350 miles one way to get home. It took about 6 hours. I was usually alone. It was from Atlanta north through the mountains so the landscape changed dramatically as I went. This was always a therapeutic drive, though I was never sure why because I too dreaded going home for the holicays. Now I realize that this is where I first learned to live mindfully - with ambivalence.

Leaving the city was always difficult. I was usually tired from work and school and it seemed five million other Atlantans were trying to leave town on the same route. Especially at Thanksgiving. But once I got through that first hour or so and the traffic lightened, things would begin to settle and the rest of the drive gave way to a meditative journey - and this was long before I had an intentional meditation practice.

The first sight of a mountain peak would lift my heart. The further away from the city I got would open to vistas of drying grass, bare trees and sometimes snow covered fields. This seeming death of the earth in it’s mirroring of the dying places in my relationships had the capacity to threaten my peace of mind with the dread I felt for the facing of “home” - the family conflicts, the old issues left over from youth that would rise up like ugly heads, the ugliness too of a longing for a new home which seemed futile. But I didn’t go there. Somehow instead, I learned to embrace these stark feelings as part of the beautiful starkness of the winter of life.

Shorter days, colder winds, and leafless trees can cause more dread in most of us than the actual experience of difficult family visits, utter loneliness or having no home at all. I have several friends who begin taking on anxiety and depression during the best of autumn days when the days are still warm and colorful leaves ornament the view with that magical changing light that comes with the new angle of the sun. For them, these gifts of earthly beauty trigger the dread of late November as early as August!

Not me. While slowly climbing through the mountains, I put on my best ambivalence playlist (from cassette tapes through the years of CDs to bluetooth) and adore the annual experience of the changing seasonal dance. This is when I practice my best pirouette balance between the dread and the joy. That, I have learned, is where to live all of life. It is a place where there is no shame in angst or sadness nor is there a desperate, sentimentalistic, grasping of the joy side.

Just life.

Just simply both.

Right here. Right now.

Be a “not me” instead of a “me too” on this one. Learn to love the dark and the light, the stark and the bright, the dread and the joy in the strength of a heart that knows how to hold both without that old brain drive to fight or flight. Then you will find a new home within.