Summer is swollen with it all, ripening like the apples in my yard. Stretching the tools I have been gathering all these years. A grief has emerged in me, one that seems to span generations. I am humbly still discovering what this grief has to tell me, but one particular thread is raising children in the face of smoke, where it’s dangerous to be outside, and fires lap at my door. The grief is mixed with rage – how did we let it get this bad? How did our ancestors stray this far? But I’ll pull that thread another day – for now I sit with this particular fire.
My neighborhood burned in late June. Our swaying golden grasses, whom I have come to see as friends, their silhouettes whispering wisdom of flexibility and movement, turned to char in a matter of minutes.
Just days later, as the black carbon settled, I was driving home with my boys. I stopped the car, jumped out, and ran through the rubble to take this photo of resilience in the midst of the ash. It’s a wild experience to feel my heart simultaneously break — and expand in awe — as I witness death and rebirth:
Yet pain teaches us to savor the sweet, doesn’t it?
Just like this sprout of grass, somewhere in the tangle of my grief, lies a swelling hope — a hope gaining momentum from the grief. And it makes me wonder: if we are all willing to feel our grief, might we create a vast, wide, and sturdy motivation to evolve? Motivating us to relate to the world and each other differently. Maybe increasing a sense of earth-based rituals, or more often sharing our fears and sorrows. Or might we simply acknowledge the truth more often, naming our roots of colonization, racism, and misogyny? For if it remains invisible, it will burn us all.
Yet we cannot be motivated by today. Or tomorrow. Our motivation must swell from a desire to ensure fruit for generations to come.
With this in mind, I choose to feel my grief. And to move through it without being swallowed, I land in the present moment again and again. I feel my feet on the ground, I lean back into gravity, and I take long, slow exhales.
I call this the present moment surrender, and I can taste its beauty when I arrive. My chest rises and falls, my shoulders soften, and I tap into a trust that there is an intelligence far beyond what I can even imagine that is breathing me.
And slowly I realize that the same intelligence breathing the apple is breathing me. Both of us swelling with the intelligence we need.
And then I lean into that and savor the beautiful moments in front of me. The sunset, the taste of ice cream, snuggles, mother ocean crashing over me, a phone call with my loved ones. And from my grief emerged this poem – a reminder of our interdependence.
Love Embodied
When my light flickers
I need wind
to stoke me.
When my fire flares
I need water
to cool me
When my heart breaks
I need you
to hold me.
When doubt swallows me
I need Earth
to ground me.
Every moment a dance
of relationality.
I lean
and am leaned on
I hold
and am held
I breathe
And am breathed
I love
and am loved
Ellen Slater, LICSW, YT-200, is a psychotherapist, educator, and founder of Head & Heart PLLC in Winthrop, Washington. She is the creator of the Compassion Cultivation Cycle™ — a somatic, non-pathologizing, earth-based framework for cultural healing both individually and collectively. Learn more at ellenslater.com.
