Spring has been a beast. Everyday has brought something: exciting challenges, deep disappointments, and feelings of physical and emotional exhaustion. In a lot of ways, I’ve been experiencing life with the season. Some days are blue skies and birds singing and then, suddenly, you find yourself in bed for 3 days - soggy and cold from the downpour around you. Except that I can’t afford to not work, so I end up carrying this wet mop of a self around. It’s heavy and inconsistently weighted so I never know how to prepare. Will today be torrential? With puddles that surround you and raincoats to keep the pounding from your ears? Or can you manage the spurts of rain showers and still slip out of the mop for long enough to cut some flowers from the yard? Or maybe even plant some new ones? I need consistency in order to maintain peace in my mind. This season laughs at that request, offering me a rainbow to look at while I figure out if I’m getting a cold ... or maybe it’s allergies...?
Fritillaria Meleagris aka "checkerboard tulips" blooming despite the rain showers. I love that even at their fullest their natural droop makes them appear quite serious, maybe even a little sad.
I’d been managing (I think) the inconsistencies and setbacks and opportunities in stride. And then, last week, I went to take my earrings off before bed and realized I only had one earring in. Cue dramatic music.
I know, people lose earrings all the time. It’s just a piece of jewelry. It might be sad, or even frustrating. But probably not world ending. Maybe you look around for a bit, keep your eyes out the next couple of days... and move on. You probably don’t engage in a 3-day Search and Rescue, but.... these are special earrings.
They did not belong to my grandmother, they weren’t given to me for a special birthday or by a lost love. I haven’t even had them that long - an impulse purchase from a small shop in an even smaller Alaska town when I was there a few months ago. There ‘should’ be zero emotional attachment whatsoever. They are handmade and silver: A pounded dark silver metal circle housing a lighter silver mountain silhouette with a moon beaming down from the summit. The detail is quality and the design is simple. They are exactly me and I’ve worn them everyday since I bought them. And now, one of them is missing.
I spent the first 8 hours sweeping corners and crawling around to peer between the floor boards of my old house, changing sheets, sifting through dirty clothes.... at one point I was throwing the ball for Astrid at 3am while using a flashlight to search between the pavers of my courtyard. I’m hopeful my neighbors slept through me sobbing in my slippers on the side of my house.
The world might have ended that night. Crying myself to sleep while searching the internet to try to remember the name of the gift shop I’d bought my mountain moon earring in.
My Mountain Moon Earring (Slacktide Gallery, Girdwood, AK)
In the days that followed, I cleaned my car (twice), and retraced my lost earring day; driving to the yoga studio, then work, then my parents house. As I searched, I began to package all of my sadness into this metal accessory. It represented my emotional exhaustion and the physical fatigue that had been creeping up for weeks. The plans for my year I’d so skillfully weaved that had slowly been crumbling, one by one. The mountains that might not be climbed and the training that was feeling unfamiliar with a body weak from a winter of injury. Clients weren’t magically appearing, and the schedule I’d been maintaining was showing it’s ware. The ‘too good to be true’ bits that had been sparkling in the corners of my life were turning out to be bits of broken glass catching the light just so, tricking me into thinking I’d found gold. The overworked mind and body and the driving everywhere to do all the things. (Side note: I love driving. But this ‘passive aggressive, timid-unless-you’re-being-an-asshole, learn how to freaking merge already!!!’, Seattle driving. Ugh) The important things intermingling with the unimportant and crowding together on top of the pounded metal mountain earring lost in the chaos of the season. My chaos.
I took a couple of days to settle hoping the earring would turn up and that maybe all wasn’t lost. My week kept throwing me curveballs. The guy I’d been hopeful about had officially forgotten my name (or at least his manners), I *allegedly* rear ended a laundry truck, I felt constantly misunderstood in otherwise clear interactions and my cat refused to let me sleep more than 3 hours at a time. I was unwilling to admit that ‘I’m just really tired’ actually meant, ‘I can barely stand I’m so depressed.’
I was sitting in meditation and the voice and words of a monk I’d heard interviewed on the radio years ago started coming back to me. (I’m laughing at how this sentence makes it sound like I have any consistency with meditation and that I have any real toolbox of insights from monks. Don’t be fooled. I listen to NPR and am failing miserably at a regular meditation practice.) He was speaking about healing emotional wounds and recognizing when and how we misidentify pain, judgement, and suffering in our lives. His message: “Remember the difference between the container and that which it contains.”
It’s a lesson I’ve come back to many times since first hearing his words - I even have it written on a post-it stuck to my laptop. They helped me recover from job loss, unrequited love, family squabbles. I’d often used these words to ease my anger, my pain and, perhaps most notably: my attachment to alcohol. I couldn’t ignore how timely the reminder was as I celebrate 5 years of sobriety from alcohol this week. My drinking was a very large container for a lot of things. I had a moment of pause and began to hear the silent pokes of my subconscious, “how about now? Get it now?” The container that held my lost earring was getting bigger and louder and the clarity I’d hoped to find was nowhere.
Sometimes you can be looking right at the message without seeing it.
Of course, I knew intellectually that my lost earring would not energize, heal, de-stress, infuse my bank account, finalize my yearly schedule and get the guy all in one miraculous moment of discovery. Yet, I still attached to this idea as though it was truth. It was easier to blame a missing piece of metal for my lonely heart - Surely, I’m not to blame for the guy running away (after sufficiently screwing with my head). And, if I’d been wearing both earrings, I’m confident that laundry truck wouldn’t have stopped short…. and that co-worker is nuts anyway, and…..
Hard to believe I’d ever lost an earring with such power...
The monks’ words boomed in my head.
After a few days, I began to settle around the earring episode, and more importantly around the shitshow this uncovered container had let spill everywhere.
I began to do The Work. You know, the stuff that is best done alone and in a mirror. I thought about all the things that I identified as off track in my life. None of it was really that big of a deal on its own. I was bent out of shape over changes to climbing plans that have to be, by nature, flexible. I was desperate for more clients, but when I actually got out of my desperate mind-set I realized that my capacity for much more was limited even if they were knocking down my door. My car was bruised but would recover and the laundry truck that my front end had kissed looked unscathed. I happened into my routine sugaring appointment (think waxing only sweeter) I was explaining my romantic dilemma to my esthetician (because that's what you do) when she kindly interrupted me, mid-sentence, and said, “so you’ve said ‘you’re a planner’ like 5 times. Does it really mean this whole situation is here to teach you how to not control everything?” HEY LADY: SHUT UP AND SUGAR ME ALREADY. Nobody cares about your stupid love advice…. and yes, IT PROBABLY MEANS THAT, OKAY?!
As I began to soften my outer shell to the words of wisdom surrounding me, I started to really connect the dots of my own struggle. What an interesting perspective to have been gifted on the Anniversary of my sobriety - this realization that I was actually the same imperfect, attached person: I’m just sober and aware of it now. Not in an attempt to discount my effort to be alcohol-free, or to take away from the important role that decision played in my life. But to realize that quitting drinking wasn’t actually The Work. That was simply a way to clear the smokey bar of my mind so that actual work could happen. For the last 5 years, I’d say I’ve been doing that Work, but in a less than present way. It's times like this that I wish I hadn't half-assed my self-realization journey.
Whenever I come to any big decision, or am ready to institute change or a new habit, or in this case of letting go - there is often a bit of Spring cleaning that comes along with it. A literal dusting of my space. I think it’s pretty logical - a desire to start fresh in every way possible. I was feeling the subtle shifts of weight as the mop of depression began to dry out in the Spring sunshine and I was ready to harness the sunnier energy. Since I’d already gotten a great head start with my frantic earring search, I decided to catch up on sorting through the mountain of folded clothes that I’d been meaning to look through for donations. I pulled the basket from the corner and into the light.
There, resting on top of the neatly folded stack of clothes that had been patiently waiting weeks (months?) for me to settle down and inspect, was my missing earring
Me, my One and Only, and my Mountain Moon Earring restored to its proper place