What’s Left

Late May, 2023: I am walking down my half-mile-long driveway when I stop in my tracks. A huge sentinel oak lies in front of me, broken at the waist, the trunk lying across the gravel road. I stand stunned that such an old fixture of our 25-year life here now lies horizontal in front of me. It is obviously something to notice. Plus, it blocks my way forward, our only exit. The occasion is monumental. This isn’t just a small occurrence, this is huge. A big change. A loaded moment of entropy that was apparently poised for a shift. This is the morning of my return from my first five-day Dreamshadow® training in Pawlet. The burl where the trunk broke was a weak point, a growth the tree created to compensate for an injury or disease that had happened there long ago. The burl gave it character, a knobby face with an open mouth that grinned like it had something to say. Spooky. But a friendly forest monster. Our neighbor Jason, who comes to haul the usable lengths of the trunk away to his portable sawmill, tells me that he used to try to jump up and see into the mouth when he was a kid. Jason is in his mid-40s now.

I had no idea what the significance of the fallen tree was that day. I still don’t. All I know is that it was synchronous with my entry into the Dreamshadow project. I had just moved into a new relationship with myself that would change everything before it and everything after. 

Now I look out my window and see broken branches everywhere. This winter (helluva winter) brought us an ice storm in the third week of January that has left a wasteland behind like a minor hurricane. Smaller trees, and younger, show shards of fresh wood exposed where limbs have fallen. Some pieces hang straight down, caught in the branches or by the bark. Some even stick straight down in the ground, marking with an exclamation point their plunge downward. 

It feels fitting to live in a landscape of destruction. The last six months have been so hard and so stressful. They started with a near-fatal car and motorcycle accident in August just a couple of days after my final project workshop for certification (more on that next edition). I was not hurt, but I didn’t make it to my parents’ house around the corner, where I was going to celebrate my mother’s 89th birthday. I kept the details of the accident secret from them because I didn’t want to increase their anxiety, and therefore mine, as the legal and financial repercussions played out. 

In the months that followed, my father’s condition of undiagnosed dementia began to unravel his personality and his mind. I had to physically block him from stealing the family car to go kill himself on New Year’s Day, and he got combative in response. (Such a surreal experience, to be telling my father I love him while he is threatening to break my fingers.) During the month of January, my siblings and I immersed ourselves in preparing a plan for the worst-case scenario—having to remove him from our parents’ home and send him to a memory care unit. Luckily, the emergency medication the doctor prescribed has worked to reduce his agitation and allowed him to continue to live with our mom. 

The beginning of February brought fresh heartache. In the interim between August and then I stopped visiting my dear friend Penny, who at 82 was also not able to handle the stressful realities of my increasingly stressful life. I chose to keep in touch by phone instead, and when she didn’t return my texts for days in the last week of January, I scouted around to see which other friends had heard from her. It turned out that she had fallen unconscious on her bedroom floor from a stroke, unbeknownst to any of us. By the time I got a neighbor to check on her, her body had suffered so much damage that she died a few days later in a hospital ICU.  As we neared the end of February, my mother was in the ICU with a temporary pacemaker stabilizing her heart rate, which for unknown reasons plummeted to nineteen beats per minute. Today, she has been transported to another hospital for a permanent pacemaker, because this morning her heart rate shot to 160 bpm. The crises just don’t stop.

All of these events, back-to-back and intense, leave me feeling as stirred up and wasted as the winter landscape outside my window. The things I thought I knew or understood have been disrupted, damaged and changed forever. I can’t fix things like I used to think I could. I can’t be the perfect person I thought I could be to avoid all possible disasters. I can’t save the people I love from pain, anxiety, or death. Most devastating of all, I have to accept it all, or I will be pulled off-center even more, even farther away from the authentic self I need to be. Like the burl of the tree over the wound site, I can’t hold things together indefinitely. Eventually something has to give. And it does.

Death and dismemberment are all around me. They have been, since the first five-day training that began my commitment to this inner work. It is not the death of me. (I hope not!) It is the death of who I thought I was before I began. Everything that is not true is falling away. I see it in the trees, until finally all that’s left is only this—what still remains. 

Like what’s left of a friendship when the friend has died, 

like what’s left of a father-daughter relationship, when his memory is gone, 

like what’s left of a mother’s heart, when a pacemaker is in, 

like what’s left of me when I surrender to this process,  

the bare soul, with no pretense or defense—

—just what’s left.