An excerpt from A Blessing For One Who Is Exhausted by John O’Donohue:
“You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.”
I have to begin this newsletter with the fact that I’m feeling tired as I write this. At my core I am a quiet person who appreciates slowness and taking time to savor life’s small miracles. Wrapped tightly around that core is a thread of persistence that propels me forwards faster than my spirit can keep up with.
It’s been over 3 weeks since I returned from Taiwan, but the combination of jet lag plus daylight savings completely destroyed my circadian rhythm, and I experienced a bout of severe insomnia this month.
Usually I’m fairly adaptable, but when I look back on the past year as a whole, it is evident that I never truly stopped to rest from the day my dad died up until now. It’s as though I had wound myself up with work, projects, travel, and activities, and now that I finally have a moment of stillness, my insides are behaving like a spinning top.
One year ago:
This time last year I was working on mixing paints for a mural by the Brazilian artist Iran do Espírito Santo. As life would have it, I took some time off from my regular work in order to do this freelance gig that was scheduled to start on March 30th, 2023, which is the day after my father passed away. So within 24 hours after learning of my father’s death, I was sitting in an unfamiliar room with people I had never met before in order to help execute a new project that would eventually end up on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art.
At the time, if I could have chosen to postpone or delay this project, I would have. The process was methodical, meticulous, and laborious, and I wasn’t sure that I could muster the kind of attention to detail it required without having had adequate time to grieve.
Little did I know that the person I was assigned to work with was an angel by the name of Juliana Kase. Juliana was supernaturally kind, grounded, and patient. This beautiful person made me feel welcomed and helpful while she explained all the steps and showed me how we would be working together.
After all 56 shades of paint were mixed over the course of a week, Juliana and I tested them on a swatch board to confirm that the grays made a seamless gradient when painted side by side.
If a single shade of grey seemed off, we’d cross it out and start over again. Eventually we got there.
While this process kept me busy and I felt like I had made a wonderful new friend, it also kept me from fully confronting the death of a loved one. After my part in the project was completed, I went back to my usual routine without taking any further time off. Not until early March 2024 (just a few weeks ago) did I return to pick up my father’s ashes and bring them back to the US.
Air travel in the afterlife
When the time came, my mother and I got into a big argument over how my dad’s ashes should be transported. The jar was bigger than the 350ml of powder that transportation security allowed in a carry-on bag, so it made perfect sense to me to pack it in my checked bag where it would be left well alone.
The idea of placing my dad’s ashes into a checked bag sent my mom into apoplectic incredulity.
“You know people will buy empty seats for their deceased loved ones.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. The ticket to Taiwan cost over $1,600 — nearly a month’s rent, and I did not have the budget for an empty seat.
“So the least you could do is bring him in the cabin with you, otherwise his spirit might not want to travel with you. He might not be comfortable enough. He might not want to go.”
I understand now that my mother’s perspective was about showing proper respect, but in the moment I was exasperated and frustrated. What made logical sense to me was blasphemous to her.
I’m not going to over-explain my spiritual beliefs, but in short I can explain that I am “open.” I believe that anything is possible because I don’t presume to know the absolute truth about mysteries beyond my comprehension. In other words; I have more questions than answers. My mother, however, was certain in her conviction that my father’s spirit would absolutely not want to travel in the cargo hold of an airplane.
I felt an intense amount of guilt that wasn’t my own. In hindsight, it intrigues me what different people consider “safe” based on belief systems, religion, superstition, and culture. To me it was safer to get this highly sentimental object home without incident. For my mother, it was safer —spiritually— to bring him in my carry-on.
Either way, I was transporting a jar of dubious powder from Taiwan to New York, and it wasn’t something I wanted confiscated by airport security before I got to my gate.
Often when my partner and I travel by plane, we have a saying to describe how we feel when we land: “My soul hasn’t caught up to me yet,” or “I’m still waiting for my spirit to catch up.” We say this as a way to describe feeling tired or jet lagged, but it’s more than that. Sometimes it truly feels as though humans weren’t built to travel hundreds of miles per hour, so we’ve left some indescribable part of ourselves behind.
By that metric, I’m not sure my dad’s spirit would have minded which suitcase his ashes were packed in. He would have made it wherever he wanted to go, on his own time.
This debate about the human spirit, however exasperating, reminded me how important transitions are. We all have inherent cycles, rhythms, and patterns that have their own natural progression and their own cosmic timing. We’re meant to move gradually, step by step, in gradients. Human beings, just like any other living organism on earth, are sensitive to change and also to disruption.
When painting the 56 shades of gray in sequence, any one of those lines out of place would be highly noticeable. Just like it is when we set our clocks forwards for even one hour, it has the potential to throw things off for weeks.
Why have humans built a reality in which we so often move out of step with our own natural rhythms? Why have we built so many systems that are in conflict with the cycles of the planet we live on?
I believe we all have the potential to create something that aligns more harmoniously with the beat of life on earth. We just need to take time to listen it.
Love,
Melanie
PS:
It looks like the eagle eggs won’t hatch this year, who knows why? Perhaps due to climate change, the cold and all the snow, or perhaps because it simply wasn’t the right time. I continue to love watching them and feel that I learn a lot from their resilience and devotion.
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♥
Beautiful, Melanie.
Thank you for this beautiful letter Melanie 💙