Falling Through Time

It is too early in this blog to write of this. But here I go, anyway. We call it Empty Nest but it is so much more. I will simply say it is like falling through time.  I will let you decide what that means. I will add that it is grief, pure and simple. BTW, I am not trying to find 5 Ways to Overcome Empty Nest (and yes, oh so many articles exist). 


I am simply living with it, alongside the many things I do that add value to my life. I understand the miracle of being aware and alive to be here, on this planet with 7 billion people--- and that beauty and pain and loss and joy and grief shimmer simultaneously every second of every day.  It is all happening at once.

Rick Bass, a western writer and activist whom I deeply respect for his love and courageous fight for the protection for wild rivers describes how he felt when his first daughter was born.
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"What I think I felt, that next day, was a newness of responsibility: an utter and concrete reminder that I was no longer the most important person in the world—that, in fact, I was nothing, and she was everything. How such knowledge saves a person, I can't quite be sure, but I felt rescued, felt as if I had passed completely through that thin curtain and into some finer land where the self dissolved, and another was born. I still feel that way, anytime I look at either of my daughters . . . . and I know that other parents feel that same way . . . ."

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Anyway, dealing with that feeling, when your kids grow up is what is called "Empty Nest" and what I feel as falling through time.  It's like the foundation of this house I call my life has been removed. Freeing. Scary. No matter how many others have gone through this, it is the first time for me. 

The rest of that article is pretty damn wonderful, by the way. If you want to read it, click here. 

"How we fall into grace. You can't work or earn your way into it. You just fall. It lies below, it lies beyond. It comes to you, unbidden.” --Rick Bass 

For a great article on Rick Bass, see this Orion magazine article.