A couple of really great walks

Holding space in joy when sorrow and grief overwhelm us

Hello Friends,

We went on two really great walks this week. And I spent an absolute ton of time in the garden. Here’s some details since the last time we spoke:

Early in the week, Mom hurt her hand. She’s doing much better now, thankfully, so we think it was just sprained and not broken, as we’d feared. Whatever it was, she was in a ton of pain and had to take it easy for several days while it healed. Poor Mom!

I tell you this not so you’ll feel bad for her — though you can, she appreciates it — but because I want to talk about how it disrupted our schedule. I kind of had to put my head down for a few days and just get through what needed to be done. Feeding us, watering and tending the garden, and walking Ginger took up the bulk of every day, and I saved our walks for last because I was afraid if I did it first, I’d get too tired for anything else and we would starve and the garden would wither and die. This meant that, instead of going out midday, we were walking in the very-late-afternoon, very-early-evening light, which is so totally different and so incredibly beautiful.

We took more than two walks this week, but two in particular stood out for being kind of breathtaking in their wonder. The first, we headed toward the Little Lake, like normal and started to walk around. I first thought the star of the day would be the light rippling on the water …

… and this bit of driftwood that reminds me of a dragon. Or maybe a crocodile? It was stunning, and I felt uplifted. I could watch light sparkle on water all day, I think.

There were also a few really great flowers along the way. This one had a lovely little bug peeking through its blooms …

… and this one just has really spectacular hair:

This all would have felt special enough. And then Ginger turned, and walked up the sand dune that separates the Little Lake ...

… from the Big Lake.

You see, Ginger loves the birds. She doesn’t chase them, but as we walk gently and respectfully along the beach, she loves the way they fly and swoop and soar and land again once we’ve passed by.

I love it too.

If I thought the light on the Little Lake was beautiful … the waves that day, and the different colors of blue and green water … it was just stunning. Photos never do justice to this place, but I also never stop taking them. And words similarly fall short, but I find myself often occupied on these walks trying to find just the right ones to tell you why this is the most beautiful place in the whole world.

Perhaps you’ve seen a lovelier spot, but I haven’t. And I never stop feeling so immensely grateful that this lake is my very intimate friend, who I can just walk down the street to visit with and — on the most special of days — who I can hear roaring from our garden and all along our walk.

I’m pretty sure Ginger and I had the same look on our faces that day:

After so much wonder that day, the next day I had no expectations for such majesty, but this dog was ready to find it. I groaned as she turned down my least favorite street — the loop that winds through the industrial park — but everything was so much more beautiful than something called an industrial park has any right to be. The light was so amazing, and everything around us glowed green and golden.

These puffy little flowers are blooming, and they’re so adorable I can’t help but love life and this planet and all the wonders of nature freshly, every time I see them:

There’s just clusters of them, fuzzing around all over the place:

At the end of the industrial park, instead of turning right, which would have taken us home, Ginger turned left and I followed because, if at all possible, we try to let her decide where we go. These are her walks, after all, and she seems to have such great ideas about what she wants to see, hear and especially smell. And by turning left, it meant she wanted to see, hear and smell the boardwalk down to the Big Lake.

This also meant that our walk was going to be a really long one!

The water was kind of teal and so super splashy, and we dipped our paws in and pranced along the beach.

But we weren’t done, because we were still quite a ways from home. This walk took us all the way down the beach, over the dunes, and back to our other friend, the Little Lake …

… who also really shines in that golden hour light.

We took a little break in a Scots pine grove (I think it’s a grove? What actually is a grove? I’m not sure, but every time we walk through here, I feel like we’re walking through a grove) …

… and soaked up a bit of the evening light.

Thank you for joining us on these walks! They were so beautiful, and I also wanted to share them with you here because they really helped me, too.

There’s a story from out there in the world, and I find my capacity for grief isn’t big enough to hold it. And I can’t help but think about the people who are having these experiences, and whose capacity for grief has to stretch in order to survive. I won’t specify which story, because it doesn’t matter. There’s always a story, and there’s always going to be another story, and I just object to a world — or maybe a species, because it’s not the world that does such things, but people to each other — where anyone’s capacity for grief will ever have to expand enough to bear such things. 

I took this overwhelm of sorrow — again, such a tiny fraction of what people are experiencing right now — out to the garden. And I took it out to the lake. And I asked the beings of light we share these spaces with to help me hold space for all the people who are experiencing things they should ever have to survive. And all the people who aren’t surviving conditions and situations they never should have had to face. It didn’t help exactly. There are so many things right now that we read and see and hear and feel, and they don’t go away just because we move on with and through our lives.

The garden, and the lake, and the glowing and shimmering grasses, and this beautiful wonderful dog don’t make these things okay. Instead, they help me hold them. They help me feel joy and beauty and love, and those feelings help expand my capacity to hold my own grief, and the grief of others as well, and the grief of a planet that is suffering, and people who are suffering, and so many other species that are suffering too. I don’t know what will happen in the coming days, weeks, months and years. I may be psychic, but it doesn’t work like that, at least not for me. But I know where I will continue to turn when I feel overwhelmed by it all. To the people and animals and places and beings who bring me joy, and to whom I hope I bring joy as well. To those people and animals and places and beings who help expand my capacity to hold space, because I just realized as I was writing this that expanding our capacity for joy — practicing true, heart-swelling joy — expands our capacity to hold space for the hard stuff too. These places and beings I turned to this week, we held that grief together. And together we expanded. In pouring my grief out into these spaces we share, and in asking for help to transmute it, the space grew bigger. And in oscillating into joy together, the space grew bigger still.

I don’t know how, but I believe it helps. And I hope my telling you about it here helps you too. Turn to the things that bring you joy, and ask for help holding and carrying your grief. Because as hopeless as so many things felt this week, the actual practice of sharing space helped me feel more hopeful than I have in a while.

Sending so much love and light from here,

Jodie