past, present, potential

Why does loving well hurt so hard? Please don’t answer. I have all of the reasons. I still throw myself at love every day. In the face of loss. In spite of my broken heart.

Time has been having her way with me the past couple of days. Nostalgia rearing her gorgeous/hideous head. Uninvited but oddly always welcome. Why must it be this way? The littlest things will stir this pot. Last night I was watching Jeb, our elder basset, as I do more and more these days. Trying to feel into what I see. Is he hurting in any way? Is he masking anything? Is he as hale as he appears or are we teetering on the precipice of some either long or rapid decline? I don’t have any idea and he won’t say. This time with an old man hound is new to me and I really don’t want to fuck it up for him. Or for me.

And also I can feel the grief of his absence already inside of me. I understand the necessity of it, the biological wisdom of it, and yet I still want to avoid feeling it. I want to hide from it or dissociate from the parts of me that it occupies. Why does loving well hurt so hard? Please don’t answer. I have all of the reasons. I still throw myself at love every day. In the face of loss. In spite of my broken heart.

This morning I checked in on my retired blog and found a comment from a post I wrote in the fall of 2015. I read through the entry, as I always do when a rogue comment pops up and proof of life stirs a little. And spoiler alert, I am very much the same today as I was then. Trying to understand how best to live my days with attention and grace. It is just that now the nine and six-year-old who occupied those days are very much grown and half-flown and don’t need me to curate their time the way I once did. I miss those two little kids so much. And the way we lived our days. You should read that old relic if you want. It was too old for me to excavate and link. It is called “making space” if you feel like digging. Good luck. It stirred me up and I had been feeling a little more unflappable in a very enjoyable way lately. It stuck a fork in that. Oh well.

Every time I think about fleeting childhood is and how much I miss theirs, I follow up that thought almost immediately with another which is: Thank God for Freddy.

I said as much to Chris this afternoon and his reply was the obvious “well meg he’s going to grow up too. His childhood will also end.” To which I reply: “But not today, time, you ferocious cunt. Not today!” I get it though. I do. I am not in denial of how it all works. This passage. All of this inevitable growth and change. It is gorgeous and glorious and I wouldn’t change a single thing, even the pain of its finitude. This is the winning ticket and I know it.

What Freddy really does for me, and does for our whole family I believe, is keep us in the center of the wondrous gift that is childhood. We use him as our barometer for joy and presence and the wide-eyed delight of life. When Maple was home briefly for Thanksgiving I wanted to do everything with her, take her on every outing I had planned. She was less enthusiastic about this idea and said that outings with Freddy and me were sometimes a tremendous time warp. That we head out for a couple of basic errands and then return hours or an entire day later. This is true. Time with Freddy is strange and hard to track. We touch into a real vibe and I defer to his clock which is not the most efficient timepiece I can think of. I’m not sorry about it. I am traversing his childhood with as much alertness as I can conjure. And other than the sturdy boundaries I wield, and aquisition of my tenure here, I try to follow his lead for the most part.

We arrived home after our whirlwind Thanksgiving in Maine after dark, which isn’t saying all that much in December, on Saturday night. There was a thick blanket of snow on the ground which hadn’t been there last week when we had departed. Freddy was so excited that he got all geared up and headed out into it, jumping in and out of snow piles. He convinced Eider to come out with him for a little bit, but was mostly content to romp around with Almanzo, that good sport.

I felt so proud of him for making that choice for himself and thought about how when I was first longing for the kids to have an experience other than conventional school days, I became obsessed with forest schools. And of course, flash forward a decade and I can look “past, present, and potential”, and see us very much living inside of that once longed-for context. With ethos around place, nature, family, and community functioning as the substance of our days. We are very much alive inside the vision, despite, or perhaps more than likely, as a direct result of, the passage of time.

This morning when I walked him into his first of two days a week out in the natural world surrounding the Nature Center with his little community of three to five-year-olds, I tried my best to stay present to the gift. It is difficult to stand in both the awe of how he gets to spend his day and the long list of shit I try to squeeze into my brief time without him. It is a distinct part of my practice for sure. But we do it. He greeted his friends and we looked at the new ornaments that the teachers made for the kids’ nature names. He chose Moose for himself this year and he is pumped. It is a perfect fit for the Freddy of Right Now. So we looked at the picture and arranged it neatly next to his friends, porcupine, cardinal, and lynx.

He is, as he often says, a friend of nature. He means it so truly. I am a friend of nature too I think. Or I am learning to be. Longing to be. I know that being a friend of nature means I also must be a friend of time. That part is harder. And loss. That part is harder still. But if he is my teacher, and Maple and Eider (and Jebby and Al and Tuti too), then I will continue to learn to love with this particular open-handedness. The kind required of someone who is designed to live fully, and love deeply, and release everything it yields back into the sky. Into the stars.