this new place

I'm currently participating in an online writing class. I get prompts to write from daily, and I interact with my fellow writers on the given topic. Some days I will post on the blog what I've written. Other days I won't. 


9/2/15 Today's prompt had to do with living in a landscape that has changed so vastly after loss.
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This place is different. Quiet. The old place was teeming with life. The new place has life, but I have to look to find it.
One of my favorite authors wrote about the spiritual practice of being still. She is not a still person by nature, so she makes herself be still for 20 minutes in the outdoors. She wrote about the strangest thing happening during her stillness, every time. She would think she was just in a regular, boring place. But after a few minutes she would notice some tiny movement, maybe along the crack in the sidewalk or along a leaf. She would see life happening- ants marching, bees buzzing. Life she would have missed while flitting about her daily routine.
Looking for life has become one of my touchstones when I am feeling especially untethered. It's not a spiritual practice for me, it's a survival strategy. When I can't breathe, I try to be still and observe that life still exists around me.
My son is dead. It feels like everything is dead. But I can stop and wait and look and listen. I always see birds flying when I look for life in the sky. If I really wait I'll see a bug crawling through the grass and I wonder where it is going, what it is doing. But I know it is living. It has life. It knows other bugs that are alive. There IS life happening. Even if it is small. Small life still counts as life. Which is good, because sometimes I feel small, or I feel like Eli's life was small.
The trick is not to go looking for life. The trick is to be still and let the life happening around you reveal itself to you. I have been sitting on a bench at night and watched a spider skitter across the pavement in front of me. I have stared at a rabbit, hopping out of the bushes, staring at me, curious. I would not have seen either of these creatures if I was not still, waiting to see the alive around me. Somehow this reins me in, coaxes me back from the edge, helps me breathe.
This new place is not great. It's not the raucous holiness of the raising of small children. It's a barren wasteland. Instead of the insanity of too much, it's the insanity of famine. It's easier to hide in plain sight in this place, and that is a relief at times. It can be deafeningly quiet. The life that is missing from my life leaves me numb while I navigate this new place. Sometimes I wonder if I have to live in this new place forever. I know there's no way back to the old place, but it's as though my brain won't accept that. My same mind that knows the old is completely gone also won't let go of the old frame of "normal".