Juncture

A journey…that daily journey across lands I don’t yet know I am crossing, across the same ground, unchanged, yet different.

I marvel how the lens is drawn in, into the core of my grief, not seeing the tracks I cross, deciding each time I cross those tracks, those quiet train tracks, and head up the 4 stone steps, across the small parking lot… deciding each time to go left to the past, to where he lives, or to the right, which leads eventually back home.

This path I carved day after day, sometimes multiple times a day….each time feeling into my body what felt right, letting myself go where it was painful, feeling how it felt to walk close to his home, then walk away. Learning in my body to walk away, to walk away from the man that left me.

How on earth do you do that, when you weren’t ready? When the door was simply shut, for no apparent understandable reason? When you love him and wish it were different?

You practice walking away with compassion, with anger, with grief, with all that your sweet body holds and releases. You walk away with tears, for now, and with blessed indifference someday….someday. And every day you turn right at that juncture, every day you don’t go left, not because you can’t feel the pain, but because you choose to move toward your life and your future, is a blessing, is a win.

Those emotions I captured in some photos, some powerful photos of my grief, of feeling lost in the fog of grief, of the hair whipping softly across my neck at the river and the softness I felt in releasing some of what gripped me. The journey through grief.

The faces we hide from people, the faces I didn’t hide from people.

Lost in a fog

All the corners I stopped and cried…but that isn’t my story. That’s a part of the story, the close-in journey, the small area I traversed within the well of grief. I didn’t venture far, yet walked 4 hours a day, sometimes retouching the same paths twice in a day. Crying. Crying the whole way. Stopping, staring, realizing I was unusual in a semi bustling world.

Who would see the face of grief? Who could stand to just witness my grief, and what story would they make up? Who was oblivious or just chose to look away?

Dichotomies….paradox…two things seemingly opposite…clarity and fog, joy and grief, life and death…together, holding hands, in the name of healing.

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