I am settled again in a tiny park on a creek far from the sprawling North Platte river of Nebraska. Two weeks ago, Northern Flickers and Red-headed woodpeckers were fledging their young noisily here. Now the only sounds I hear are the wind and the chuckles of nuthatches.
The Nebraska sun is as startling as it was in Wyoming; as if altitude and latitude have emptied the sky for the light to shine through.
I find the sun spilling onto my thoughts.
There was an overcast to my writings from the Gulf coast and the Appalachians; a gray film laid upon my compositions as much by my marriage and its aftermath as the climates in which I lived and traveled.
People who haven’t spent much time on the Upper Texas coast are under the impression that its beaches, like those portrayed in other parts of the world, are sunny and bright the majority of the time. I lived in the Houston area for over forty years and was surprised by the number of cloudy and foggy days that held Surfside Beach, TX in a strange timelessness for much of fall, winter, and spring. As a person with sun sensitivity for many years, I had never minded a cloudy day, nor even a cloudy week.
The long weeks of clouds and fog on the island, especially in spring when I craved brief rain showers, bright sun on chilly days, and blooming wildflowers, wore on me and drove me to purchase a “therapy” light. For the first time in my life, I grew tired of clouds.
The Appalachians were barely different in the spring and early summer weeks. Cold, damp, and overcast a good bit of the time, even when sunny, the confinement of the mountains made me feel like I wasn’t truly seeing the sun.
All these places, TX, Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, were beautiful and I am not complaining. My privilege and opportunity to be there was grace in the gray.
No, what I am saying is simply that, as I sit in the midst of shimmering Nebraska cornfields in early August (having returned from Wyoming), it intrigues me how my geographical/meteorological journey has paralleled my emotional and psychological journies.
In these vast midwestern and western spaces, sunrises and sunsets stretching unabated around me, my heart feels like it is reopening.
Now, my words are built in the shade of trees shredding sunlight into streamers. They are blooming and blown in the Great Plains winds along with the cottonwood, dandelion, and milkweed fluff.
These words are as airy and meaningless perhaps as that fluff, or as dense and nutrient-rich as the algae that have taken over the nearby creek in the late summer doldrums.
I feel the sun in my veins.
I know this isn’t the end of cycling into depression. That, after all, has been with me since 1994. But something is different. Perhaps it’s a sense of this journey ending in a couple of months and a new path ahead. Perhaps it’s the creeping knowledge that the love in my heart is finding its way to myself rather than seeking a man. That has been a long time coming. However, I think those are incidental results of my journey.
The truth is, I have conquered fears these last many months, powered through errors of mine and others, and parried the hurtful words of loved ones aside into, if not apathy, at least resolve. Finally, I have come to recognize that no matter how I might attempt to make others grasp how I came to this point in my life, nor how justified I am in my rage and grief, they will simply never understand because I have shielded all but a very few from the worst of my experiences.
When I first considered that last truth, I was distraught. I wanted desperately to be understood and have my pain validated; to prove that one needn’t have bruises and broken bones to be damaged by another person. Now, in the full sun and wide plains of my healing heart, I simply don’t care.
I have much work yet to do. I am listening to The Body Keeps the Score and find myself having to turn it off and sit in silence for long moments. Recognizing what I knew already, that my autoimmune symptoms, now largely nonexistent, were a result of my trauma, and that multiple people in my life are fighting similar battles with their own trauma, sends shockwaves through my psyche at times.
That recognition also gives me hope. I am trying to heal and grow. I am not giving up. I am self-aware and know that, while I wasn’t in full control of what happened in my past, I am taking control now. I will not let the fog of abuse and disrespect tell me who I am and what I will become.
This has been a resolution of mine since the day I chose separation and later divorce, but bringing it to fruition is a process and the steps are halting, at best.
Having stepped into bright light for the moment, I feel an immeasurable peace that I haven’t felt since perhaps the 1990s. I am amused that I find it, ultimately, in a tiny creek oasis surrounded by cornfields.