we can’t think our way free
dying off // awakening fall feelings
Dear human form,
Have you been feeling them? I’m talking about the #fallfeelings.
A lighthearted hashtag I coined in my 20s, that goes way deeper.
These feelings that seem to awaken the spirit when the air cools — bringing with them an often overwhelming sense of being alive in this human form — reminding us of the living complexity of all of it.
It’s these feelings that take me straight to the nerve.
It’s also something I associate with arriving during the month of October.
Riding this 12 month spiral around and around, this time of year brings up the feelings that have always been there.
It also signals the cycles and events that are etched in my visceral memory.
It’s the month I first experienced the death of a loved one — Papa — 25 years ago.
It’s the month that every heartache I’ve ever had is suddenly accessible to me again in this very real kind of way.
It’s the month we took our last hike with our dog Escher and the month we scattered some of his ashes in the same location a couple of cycles later.
It’s the month I sense the pieces of me that still need to die off.
It’s the month I feel all the lifetimes I’ve lived, at once.
In one breath I close my eyes and I am a little girl riding the crazy bus or tilt-a-whirl at the fair.
In another breath, I’m picking up pieces of another’s breakdown.
In one breath, I’m riding bikes through downtown a month into moving across the state to be with Andrew.
In the next, I’m buying my red plaid shirt at a store in a city I may never visit again, wearing it over and over, again and again.
In the same way I wear the same feelings, over and out.
I wrote this in a text the other day:
October always haunts me in a way — also the most alive times I’ve felt.
I want to make peace with myself and all the things in my life. I think that’s where I am landing.
I keep pushing past that need and trying to get to something different.
Like a claw game grasping for a stuffed animal and then watching that claw come back up empty handed.
Wondering why I keep thinking I need more than I have.
I’ve been in fight or flight mode again.
If you understand, then you understand.
If you don’t, it feels something like being on the edge of your seat, bracing for… whatever.
It wasn’t like this this summer, but since being in one place things have closed in.
It happens regularly for me in context with community, when we’re not “moving.”
I go from free-roamer to feeling like I owe everyone, all of me.
An overload of choice and possibility, and yet I am not sure which way to turn, so I turn myself around and around and around in exhaustion.
When Andrew reminds me to disappoint people, it feels like I’m being hit with a dagger. Literally, a very threat to my own sense of self and safety.
How extreme, right?
To realize that feeling like I’m inconveniencing anyone, physically makes me want to crawl out of my skin.
I put an immense amount of pressure on myself that no one else sees.
My life is much easier to manage when I am alone, and yet I don’t want to be. But how can I not lose myself in proximity?
I’ve never had a guide book for being how I am. And the only reason I share as much as I do, is in case you feel the same way too.
And yet I’m still not being completely honest, because I am afraid of losing — something I can’t quite put my finger on.
Perhaps it’s the weight of being perceived.
…
As I sat across the table from my dear friend in the Marshmellow (our home on wheels) the other week, I was explaining some of this — the weight of upholding a certain role when in context.
She told me how she now lets guests that stay on her property see her with her messy hair and in her PJs. She doesn’t dress herself up into this certain role.
She then asked me this:
What happens when the chips fall?
The facade crumbles, I answered.
And what happens when the facade crumbles?
People see.
What happens when people see?
Absolutely nothing.
Except…
The charade is over.
Who do I want to be?
Be like her first and the rest will follow.
The dying off parts
I looked up and watched the leaves shake, rattle, and roll through the sky, floating their way down to the ground around me.
Is it weird to say they sound like bones?
The wind whipped the other night as we slept along the Blue Ridge Parkway across the state line in Virginia. Absent of phone service or expectation, I could feel the longing in my own bones, masked by the tasks.
I woke up in the panic of the void, like I do from time to time.
How do I explain it? It’s like this inner urgency. This quest for closeness and protection from the reality of this fleeting life. A blankness or just a blanket of dark. It’s terrifying and vast, a clarity that no one else will ever know what it’s like to be you. A feeling of trapped and then after it passes — freedom.
It’s almost like waking up from the matrix of the mind. Actually, that’s exactly what it is.
In the morning we woke up and went for a trail run together. For the first time since our ultra event a month ago.
The thing I never said about the marathon was that it broke us down not only in our belief of self to finish what we started, but the belief in us working together when things get hard.
So we tried again with less expectation.
And something happened to us that’s never happened before — we got lost.
Totally lost.
No green markers.
No service.
Steep, tripping, leaves, slipping. Repeat. Looking up, down, all around.
At some point we just sat down in the leaves.
I remembered something Andrew had said the night before — there’s infinite possibility you’re not seeing in your mind when you’re only thinking of the worst case.
I smiled and almost laughed knowing we needed this. I needed this to find trust in the present moment again. In us working together.
Finally I looked up to a place I’d yet to see, and saw a marker of faint green. Could it be?
Only problem, it was straight up.
Like bears we got on our hands and knees, earth slipping out from under us as we clawed our way up.
There’s this gratitude that comes in like an overwhelming wave in these moments.
Suddenly the exhausted legs or scrapes or being dirty or out of water or way behind my schedule of the day — all of that was gone. Poof!
And what entered in its place was just this sense of — I’m alive.
I’m alive.
I’m alive.
It took getting lost to find this state again.
What else needs to keep dying off so I can feel this more often?
Even when I’m not lost in the woods and unreachable.
Everything that’s in my mind that tells me anything matters more than what’s in front of me.
This note was left for me (from Andrew) this morning, and maybe it’ll land with you too:
“I want to be different. I want to be different.”
This is a new season, marked by the longer nights.
“time for going inward,” she likes.
Into the heart, not the mind.
Going further into the mind would be another layer deep.
Deeper into fears, wants, and past mistakes.
Adding chaos infinite.
No, instead, inward into the heart.
A place for self and repair.
The law here is the breath. The connection to the body.
Bringing attention to the breath will bring attention to all of what we are…
A human body, with the ability to transmit a spirit.
We are a vessel for something greater.
But as soon as we THINK, we unknowingly try to substitute the spirit.
How can we transmute the things that come up for us, into who we want to be as we step forward into another minute, hour, day, week, month, or year of being human?
Hurt has taken me by the hand lately and yet I’d like to hold gratitude instead.
Is it supposed to come up this time every year so a new level of awakening can occur?
So I can make peace with every part of my being in the way I say I want to?
Can I let go of what I think I need to know to get there, and just be here?
I take a breath and I remind myself:
You don’t need to know.
You don’t need to know.
You’ll be guided in time.
Like the green marker on the tree.
You couldn’t see it, until you could.
That’s my trip up, every time.
Trying to figure it all out.
I don’t need to know. Not all of it. Not all at once. Not right now.
I’ll never think my way free.
I preach a lot about following how we feel, the flow of life, and the next right thing.
And truly, it’s how our journey has unfolded. It’s honestly the only way it works over here.
And yet, lately I’ve seen things around me I want. And feel I can’t have.
I’ve tried to move the pendulum forward, and it’s swung back and knocked me off my feet.
I’ve been met with this metaphorical wall I can’t seem to scramble my way over.
I’ve been in a waiting mode — wanting to move forward but being unable to in the way I want to.
I see things down the line I doubt I’ll be able to have. Forgetting that at one time, I thought the very same things about this life I’m living.
Forgetting that these versions I’m seeing in other stories are never meant for mine.
That the best things I’ve ever landed in have taken time, and were never how I pictured.
So I’m going to encourage you, too.
If you find yourself spinning the same song on repeat like me.
Let’s try a different tune and just see what kind of tempo it could give us.
But we won’t be able to hear it if we keep holding our breath and holding on to the thoughts that keep sinking us down deeper.
Let’s let those parts keep dying off.
With care,
Sarah
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Ugh… so good. All of this.