Going through the items in your home, making choices about what to keep and what to release, is a walk down memory lane where you revisit old versions of yourself remembering just who and what you were about when that particular object joined your collective.

These last few weeks I’ve sorted through so many past versions of me, it’s been dizzying.

It’s fairly easy to trace my steps and own evolution up to the point of 2016- I’ve smiled fondly at some of those older memories, kindly said goodbye as I don’t believe they are meant to move to Kauai with me- but the course trajectory changed entirely the day my brother died. And I continue to live the truth that you cannot lose somebody you have loved in a deeply personal, intimate way and not become a different creature.

Some days I am still unable to wrap my mind around him being gone, and I have this profound awareness that I don’t really know who I’ve been or how I’ve managed to do life these last last 15 months. I just know that something changed fundamentally inside of myself January 18, 2016.

I walk around with something invisible broken. Nobody can really see it. Sometimes I try and tell others about it- dare them to see beyond what is being presented to them, see deep into me, see if they can see and validate the scope of this wound.

But words fall flat. And not many people have been taught how to see. And I still don’t fully have language to describe the break, so I can never convey its profundity. I can feel it though- it’s gone into hiding, burrowed far within, because it’s never really had the space or time or support to come out and breathe and be seen.

I have come to the conclusion that it is the kind of broken wound that can’t be healed by others. Instead if must be offered up for healing to the land and sky and trees and seas and source of love itself.

There is magic in the earth of Kauai. Geologically the oldest of all the islands something mystical is contained in its soil- sacred stories and ancient ways and a reverence for the land that has been lost to too many these days. I don’t believe it is a mistake that the place that serendipitously opened up for us to live is up in the hills of the Wailua Valley where the first inhabitants of the island lived.

There is healing and support of a kind I’ve yet to experience waiting there.

I can feel it in my bones. I can feel it in my mind and heart and soul. That broken part of me has been stirring in hope at the prospect of space and sky and breath and safe and calm that is coming her way.

Soon, soon, soon, I tell her, even as I keep asking her to stay invisible and stay deep so she doesn’t disrupt my flow, and the rest of me can keep showing up and getting on with the tasks of moving and living and going forward.

Maybe someday, when the shores of Kauai can be called home and not just dream, enough space and time will have traveled by that I can look back on the changes that losing Brent wrought within, see the bigger picture, and better understand how and perhaps why this current version of self came to be.

But for today I have an office to pare down and sort. A coat closet to clean and clear. More boxes filled with stuff to take to donation. Rays of sun that are shining through the windows asking me to take a break, go be with the trails and trees and find respite in the earth of Alaska, slowly waking up to the seeds of spring, for a bit.

And a wistful yearn of ancient hills and hidden parts and mystery seas and a cauterized wound in need of ocean salt and sunshine continuing to call to me.

Soon, I tell her.
Soon, soon, soon.