After a Year of Being an Orphan
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- Published on Tuesday, 03 January 2012 10:43
- Written by Barbara Snow
The death of our parents is a huge event. Only then do the energy chords that first defined us dissolve and we are once again in a womb, but this time, one of our own making. I didn’t know this until I became an orphan, although I lived thousands of miles from my parents for nearly three decades. I didn’t feel it as much after Mother died, but the first year after Daddy died, I felt keenly the loss of the energetic platform. Partly it was what I resisted in order to define myself. Partly it was safety, home, a point of connection. It felt chaotic, confusing, scary. And I experienced an ongoing eruption of creativity. The process appears to be a kind of soul retrieval, parts of myself lost along the way that are blossoming. Dissolution of my old world has fueled exploration of my new one: the space within myself. Authenticity is addictive. There is a thrill – an actual physical experience of resonance - when you do what you deeply love. You can feel it and you can hear a cosmic click when you follow the pulls in your belly.
It was challenging for me at this anniversary to acknowledge how different everything is. I live in a different place, drive a different car, wear different clothes, and have a different rhythm to my day. Instead of a suburb of Louisville outside Boulder, I live on a ranch in the mountains. My Volvo gave up the ghost and I bought a great old pickup that I drive around with my beloved dog that I didn’t have last year. I don’t wear business clothes any more, can’t bring myself to put on a blazer. I love my jeans and boots, and I write and teach at the free university and I feel how these things make me think differently. The process is subtle, but when I look at how different everything is, I see that it’s moving at lightning speed. Grief and loss are doorways through which we find new parts of ourselves.
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