The following piece is one I started writing in late 2022, when I sensed a big change coming. The feeling intensified throughout that year and into the next, yet I found ways to go on with life as best I could and tried to be patient with the process I was in, whatever that process was, I really didn’t know, which made it all the harder. It’s now the beginning of 2026, and as I read this piece, I have so much compassion for the woman I was then. I see her. I see how unsure she was, yet how fiercely she trusted in whatever it was calling.
xx
All morning, I found myself going through the motions. Motions so familiar I didn’t have to think, but they did feel heavier than usual. Like I were under water. Every muscle in my body required extra effort to move. I dropped things. Struggled to make sense of words. My children’s voices came at me in muffled tones. Somehow I got everyone up and fed and dressed and out the door. I even got myself to the bus stop. As I stood waiting, the heaviness seeped deeper into my body, and deeper still, until I felt frozen in place, as if cemented into the sidewalk. Not even a toe would wiggle. Traffic roared by yet sounded more like airplanes far away in the blue yonder. For a moment I wondered if I was dreaming. I couldn’t even remember having walked to the bus stop myself. And who were these people standing around me? I couldn’t make out anyone’s faces. All eyes were locked into handheld screens. This made me laugh. Out loud. I have no explanation for it. There was nothing funny about the scene. But laughter came out of my mouth and vibrated in the people’s ears. They looked up, I saw their faces for their first time, just for a second because their eyes darted like tiny fish back under water again.
Laughter warmed up my body. I could wiggle my toes. The warmth kept coming as I awkwardly lifted one whole leg. I could turn my neck and see the big red bus coming. It rumbled up with the smell of diesel and fumes and opened its big, wide doors and spoke in its robotic female voice. I watched everyone line up and climb into its mouth. My body was so warm, warm, warm now. I could move every muscle. The bus driver looked at me. You getting on? I don’t remember how I said it, maybe it was a flick of my hand, or a nod of my head, but I told him, No, I’m not getting on. I turned around and saw a patch of forest. I’m going there. My body felt as light as air. I felt like running. I heard music coming from the treetops. I saw all the tall meadow grasses dancing. It was like stumbling into a gathering and being immediately welcomed in.
Is this how it ends? I wondered. Is this how I walk away from something I’ve depended on my entire life? Not just to pay the bills, but to tell me who I am. To give me something to say when people ask, what do you do? To give me a sense of belonging too. I belong to this company, this team. I belong to their vision, their purpose. It’s actually a lot easier than belonging to one’s self, one’s own vision and purpose.
My mind kept telling me to go back to the bus stop. You’ll catch the next one, it assured me. You’ll be late, but you should still go.
My mind said yes, you should.
My body said no.
It was like standing in the middle of a bridge. I’d walked out onto this bridge so many times before without ever crossing over. Terrified, I’d always turned and walked back into thing I knew so well. Jobs I’d taken and kept returning to, decisions I’d made and forced myself to stick with, places I’d lived and never left, ideas about myself that felt restrictive yet continually reinforced. Even when these things were well past their expiration dates, I kept them stocked in my proverbial pantry because, I don’t know, it felt safer somehow. And yet I continually found myself on this bridge, pacing it for weeks, maybe months, god, maybe even years, never going to the other side.
Everything in my body wanted to cross over today. Why today?
I couldn’t say why. I couldn’t even see the next step.
“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” – Rumi
The forest spit me out onto a road. I didn’t want to take it or any of the trails. So crowded and marked with highway-like signs. Enter here. Exit there, or Continue this way. Thanks, but no thanks. I needed another route, and so I wandered for a little while. A little while that turned into a very long while.
Until I came to a large meadow. I’d been there a few weeks earlier harvesting red clover blossoms. I stepped into the meadow again, but it was different this time. The grasses and clovers and dandelions had grown higher than my knees. I waded through them, wet and sticky. I didn’t like the feeling at all. I began to high-step as fast as I could, wanting to get to the other side where I knew there was a footpath. I remembered it being there. But when I finally made it across the wide expanse of meadow, there was no path. It must’ve gotten buried under all the grasses, now reaching up to my waist. I had no choice now but to surrender to the experience. Let myself be immersed in meadow. Chewed up and washed and polished by meadow.
No one knew where I was. I hadn’t told anyone that I’d missed my bus, and therefore missed my train too. Was I going to work late, or not at all? I still didn’t know.
I was circling the edges of a meadow. I was circling the edges of my life.
If only I could ditch the heavy bag I was lugging around. It was filled with a laptop, two different phones, noise cancelling headphones, a stack of printed media, and a little pouch filled with pads and cloths. I leak everywhere. I carry pads to catch the blood and pads to catch the milk since I haven’t weaned my 14-month old yet. My bladder also trickles whenever I sneeze or cough or laugh too hard. “That’s what carrying and birthing 3 babies does to you,” my doctor said. My eyes, too, they leak for unknown reasons. What does it mean to be a watery vessel filled to the brim with all these mixed fluids and feelings, sloshing over every edge? Why must I cover every opening and crack with something that can absorb it all, never let it show?
The thing is, I have a good job. I genuinely enjoy the people I work with. I feel they depend on me, even though I know I’m disposable. There are plenty of people who can do what I do – and maybe better than I now, because the work doesn’t call to me like it used to. Something else calls me now, though I’m not exactly sure what it is, or if I’m capable of what it’s asking.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve kept calendars and lists and lived by the ticking hands of a clock. I’ve followed guidelines and deadlines and best practices set by others. I’ve operated at a pace dictated by corporate growth charts and social expectations and, to my best ability, prioritized the needs of others. But that hustling woman in me, I think she might be dying.
It started just after I turned 40 and has become more and more intense in the years since. I can feel that young woman receding, as if actually coiling up and becoming small inside of me. She’s leaving, and I wish she wouldn’t, because I know her so well. That structured, ambitious, responsible, unbreakable woman. It’s not that I find her very comfortable anymore, but she’s familiar. And in her wake is someone I don’t quite recognize yet. I can’t define her or get any sense of the direction she’s headed. Does she have a direction?
I came to a literal bridge. A chance to step out of the loop. To cross over the river, that blessed river that always knows where it’s going. Downward, downward, surrendered to the force of gravity. That blessed river effortlessly paving new routes, new opportunities for whole ecosystems to spring to life. Its gurgling sound drew me out of the meadow, towards the bridge.
No, no, I told myself. Hadn’t I had my moment of rebellion already? Time to pull myself together, get myself to the office, because it’s the right thing to do.
Exactly, said the voice in my head. You’re being childish, selfish. Pick up the bag that just fell of your shoulder as you stepped down towards the river. Pick it back up, turn back around, go back to catch the next bus. Back, back, back. It felt like swimming against the current. My was so tight it hurt. I wanted to let it loose. Let it flow like the river, free and fluent in every tongue that ever was or ever will be.
Leaves rained down from the tree canopy. It’s autumn now and everything is turning. After gathering energy, collecting light and carbon all spring and summer, the leaves are now falling to earth, they’re floating down the current, piling up in wet heaps where they’ll decompose, nourishing life in the process. Someone recently scolded me for raking my leaves. Said I should leave them on the ground for the worms and fungi, said they’re so nutritious I could plant my potatoes in them. Maybe that’s why the leaves float so gracefully to earth, pirouetting on the breeze without any resistance, maybe they know the secret, they’ve solved the mystery, that to go on is to let go.
How does it feel going from green to gold? Does it burn? Do you know how gorgeous you are? I had so many questions for the leaves. Do you choose where you land? Do you know what you’re becoming next? They answered in the way that only leaves can, just letting go, giving to the currents of wind and water at will, and in a way, I understood this dying process as the next step of their life journey.
A train of leaves passed under the bridge. I followed a fiery red one shaped like a wide open hand. It stayed open as it bumped against the edges of the river bank, even when it got snagged on a fallen limb. Other leaves came along and piled on top of it, but it never closed a single finger.
I put my face closer down until I could feel the spray of water. my body took it in, drank it up. It drank and drank like an empty vessel being refilled. I was becoming soft. So soft I couldn’t stand. I laid down and stretched my arms towards the river.
So far, that’s the only one thing I knew about the woman I was becoming. She’s softer, and freer. She needs to flow. To edges. Beyond edges. Beyond comforts and calculations and structures of the corporate world I’d been forcing her to fit into even though I’d known for long time that it hurts. Does it hurt everyone, or is there something wrong with me? I kept trying to get around it, trying to keep one foot in the regularly programmed and routined world where everyone else seemed to be flourishing, but it was becoming impossible, I was losing my balance, and whatever was calling me would not stop calling, I could not find a way to silence it, despite all my best efforts, it only escalated, sometimes it screamed in my ears, swirled in my gut. It was time to let go and face whatever was on the other side, and so I knew what I had to do, and I was doing it then, I was going back to the meadow where I’d dropped my bag, I was fishing out my work phone and, with fingers shaking, I was writing, I’m not feeling well today, and instantly I was feeling better than I had in a very long time. And then I was running back to the bridge, stopping to bow down, and then I was crossing over. I was on the other side, entering a stretch of forest where enormous oak and spruce trees towered overhead, and the light quietly hid.
To be continued…..
