Grief & Home: understanding our relationship with grief

I find myself reflecting on this last month from a recycled wooden chair at Cartel Coffee nestled in the nostalgic browns and greens of southwest architecture. Shades of palm trees and Kokopellis grace the glass windows and warm brown brick walls. Camelback mountains frame the city and warm sunshine rains down on each strand of hair on my head. I reflect on orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees in neighbors' front yards. The lingering smell of creosote after a fresh but rare rain. With every visit over the years, I watch it evolve from a softer bustling city with history and memories and culture and sunshine to one that is a busier and busier tourist and spa destination. Maybe this is how it's always been, but I find myself seeing the land, the city, with new eyes. The apartments become taller, and the space becomes fuller and fuller of what feels like towers for the just out of reach. The space is eaten up, and the streets become a racetrack of cars in claustrophobia. My mind struggles to put together childhood strolls through old town into context with the way it's evolved through my eyes today. In my head I see wide rolling deserts and hills. All the romantic aspects of my home.

It's interesting how as our perspective grows, as does the way we see everything in front of us. My cycle was a childhood romanticism - pessimism and hate - to distance romanticism - a less romantic and less pessimistic way of seeing homeland: balanced reality. I deeply miss being immersed and almost pleasantly drowned in southwest buildings, angles, textures, curves, and colors that are oh so familiar to me, and yet, I despise the rat cage that I often feel I am in when I'm in the city like this. Grids and grids, and grids, and grids of people. Where do you get away to? Where is the place I can hide that's not inside? What about when I want to get away to nature? What if it's too hot? These are all questions that don't matter when I am romanticizing getting away from my now home and escaping to familiarity and the comfort of my childhood. And yet, the childhood memories and imprints are often the very thing that I am escaping, imprinted onto my new home, the new places I go, and the new people I meet. 

This is where we meet reality. 

We cannot escape ourselves and the ups and downs of anywhere we may go. Homeland brings me to the root. Root magic. Root trauma. Root patterns. New home brings me to the branch. Branch magic, that stems from me. Branch trauma that stems from me. Differentiation and a dealing with homeland grief. 

Moral of the story: Pain cannot be escaped. Beauty is everywhere. Reality holds both forces, both polarities. I will feel grief for different reasons in both lands. I miss the touch of my partner and my friends that are a part of my new life forward in my new home and I grieve an ever-changing homeland with generational lineage I'm currently in. My heart is fractalized and the river branches down the so many paths that my heart has touched and held on to. To feel the pain that I do, means that I have loved fully. I have felt fully. This is inevitable. 

I reflect on the fact that I have to be okay with all of these complexities. I cannot remove them. I cannot avoid them. So how do I deal with them? Use them? Honor them? Move through them? This is the question I'll aim to ponder in this next paragraph. 

I will write them down. Like I am at this very moment. I will cry for them in my childhood bedroom. I will make art that contains the grief of eons of dusty painful memories embedded in my DNA. I will make art that contains the lifetime of beautiful saguaros under dark desert thunderstorms in a purple and orange sky. I will share all the beauty that my fingertips have touched, and I will pour the pain from my lips that beg to leave my body. I will open my mind to the beauty in my human experience. The beauty of dreamy desert memories that I can no longer touch. And when I think about it, isn't this exactly why we create art? A conversation comes to mind I recently had about how every artist so desperately wants to share something they can't quite convey. A vivid memory or sensation that's bursting to be heard, bursting to be seen, bursting to be mirrored. How often have we thought, "why am I not able to convey this vision as well as I feel it? Am I not good enough?" And yet this is one of the most universal human experiences we can have has creators. Even the shared grief of not quite being able to convey has a touch of magic. 

This week's very painful, and very beautiful gift? A remembering of how to gently hold both polarities, love and grief. A remembering that we cannot hold on to the past as hard as we may try. We must learn to flow like the river, setting our destination and gently allowing the river to take us. We redirect when needed, but we enjoy. We take each moment as it comes, let the emotions move, observing them like art, and then, we translate those deep wells of emotions into actual tangible art. poetry. dance. tears. 

And the cycle begins again.