Five Years

Pete died five years ago today. As a way to mark the time, I offer:

• five learnings
• four pictures 
• three haircuts 
• two songs
• one blessing ​

Five Learnings: 

1. It’s ok and normal to talk to dead people. 
   
2. Anxiety is indeed the missing stage of grief. It feels like fear and is foreboding. 
   
3. Denial, Bargaining and Anger all happen in our heads. But when loss descends into our body, that’s when depression begins. 
   
4. All relationships change after loss and everyone grieves differently. It takes awhile to figure out how to come back together. 
   
5. Moving forward comes with its own kind of loss.
   

Four Pictures 

I had Pete's Martin guitar fixed and this is our reunion: a girl and her guitar.

About at the one year mark, I went on a trip in search of my joy. Found it at the Wild Goose Festival.

For the first year of the pandemic, I took a picture almost every evening of the sunset claiming, "and it was evening."

The door to our screened in porch was broken. Robins made a nest in a wreathe.

Three Haircuts (and three different pairs of glasses) 

Two Books: 

My personal anxiety produces "mean" talk in my head. Thank you to my therapist who suggested it.

Most meaningful book I have read these past five years. It will count as one that formidably changed my theology.

 One Blessing by Jan Richardson in ​A Cure for Sorrow 

Welcoming Blessing 
​
When you are lost
in your own life. 

When the landscape 
you have iknown 
falls away. 

When your familiar path 
becomes foreign 
and you find yourself 
a stranger 
in the story you had held 
most dear. 

Then let yourself 
be lost. 
Let yourself leave 
for a place
whose contours 
you do not already know, 
whose cadences 
you have not learnedf 
by heart. 
Let yourself land 
on a threshold 
that mirrors the mystery 
of your own 
bewildered soul. 

It will come
as a surprise
what arrives 
to welcoem you 
through the door, 
making a place for you 
at the table
and callin you 
by your name. 

Let what comes, 
come. 

Let the glass 
be filled. 
Let the light 
be tended. 
let the hands 
lay before you 
what will meet you 
in your hunger. 

Let the laughter. 
Let the sweetness
that enters 
the sorrow. 
Let the solace 
that comes 
as sustenance
and sudden, unbidden
grace. 

For what comes, 
offer gl;;adness. 
For what greets you 
with kindly welcome, 
offer thanks. 
Offer blessing 
for those 
who gathered you in
and will not be forgotten -- 

those who, 
when you were a stranger, 
made a place for you 
at the table 
and called you 
by your name.