On anxiety, on how we show up, on feeling all the things. My time with Sheena.
Sheena and I met on a chairlift almost 10 years ago. It was a bluebird powder day on a weekday. It was still the recession. The slopes were empty. I was still learning to snowboard, learning the mountain. She was with a talented girlfriend and they invited me to follow after them on the mountain. It was a magical day. Our paths crossed very little in person post bluebird day but social media allowed us to stay connected. When I left Facebook I put an open call to any of my ‘friends’ that I would love to connect with them in a more meaningful way. Sheena invited me to visit her in Portland, Maine. And so I did 6 months later.
Sheena is the type of human you can feel enough around. For two people who knew each other very little we immediately dove into the deep stuff of who we are and what we’ve been dealing with. We talked about depression and anxiety over milk poached cauliflower (which was amazing by the way). And it was easy seemless conversation. It’s nice to talk about this stuff with out having to tie it up in a neat bow, or try to explain away the fact that sometimes you’re just not ok.
Here are some of Sheena’s own words:
“On the note of someone comparing their life to yours, I spoke to my counselor about this this past week. I feel the to conceal the good in my life to keep it safe from scrutiny by those who wish for the same good in their own lives. Or needing to conceal the darkness because someone might take away from my experience or one up me somehow. Those are my fears at the moment.
My counselor told me that no one has the right to take away my bright light! We all have the beautiful and unique power to make change, and lead lives we’re personally proud of. ❤️
But it’s so hard to lead life that way. “
Erin lost her niece suddenly. Her sister miscarried. Erin took the experience to heart. She felt like she should have been the one to die.
Tears welled in Erin’s eyes as we stood in the morning light in a still empty Montreal park. The trees and grass were still waking up from winter. The beauty was quiet. Like Erin’s.
Sure, we can all read this and feel like this story that Erin has been telling herself is crazy. That it is an illogical leap to go from thing a to meaning b, but how often do we all do this. I do this. This is Erin’s lived experience. This painful, awful thing happened. Her family lost baby Stella.
But out of this darkness Erin found new handholds in life. What we shared in the park that morning was shared pain. We’d both been living through the hardest time of our adult lives and we were both climbing out.
not yet equinox
lifting my head,
lifting from tunnels of snow, suddenly twenty-four below
sunshine and snow sculptures and rime sparkling;
lifting from screens and stories and laughter and
william kamakwamba's windmill in wimbe
Becoming
news and history
cycles cycling, spinning, circling….
lifting from sandy hook
and sand creek,
from stephon clark and nelson mandela and robert e lee and colin kaepernick
from rokhshana and rosa parks and kellyanne conway and lauren small rodriguez
from black lives and brown lives and all lives, wild life and
my own sweet, complicated, imperfect loved ones and the avalanche,
the avalanches
churning spectacular snow, each unique
beautiful crystal swept
weighty with time, wind, worn
neighbors
bound by pressure, triggered,
flowing and
resting, cemented history
melting, flowing again – cascading meandering swirling and
watering fields, filling swim holes, moistening roots and tongues and
evaporating,
creating that joyful rainstorm kids race through, laughing and
that violent thunderstorm that churns hailstorms….
lifting my head,
light balances: equal,
seeds strong
awake under winters’ drifts.
Words by Kate
Liza runs down rocky trails with her arms outstretched like a forest elf. She takes it all in. She runs into the cold Atlantic with the same zeal. She’s mostly smiling. And it is contagious.
We met on an all girl group trail run in Cape Town. I was a visitor eager to find some trail companions. I invited anyone willing to dinner after the trail run. Liza and one other, a local physical therapist joined me.
Three strangers at a table talking about everything over pizza while the crazy cape winds raged all around us. Our stories spilled from us like confessions but with out the shame or guilt. We had so much in common in our struggles.
Liza had finalized her divorce yesterday. She’d take a sabbatical from her architecture career to go to Europe to "‘let the waves of this experience hit her’ as she put it. She wanted to feel it all and go through it. Her boss apparently thought it was a crazy coping strategy.
On my last night in Cape Town, Liza and I went to this lesser known beach with incredible boulders. We talked little. We watched the sunset. We both snapped photos of each other. Everyone else watching the sunset was prepared with picnics and wine and blankets. We just had ourselves and a camera. And laughter. And a newfound sisterhood.
