I never imagined, so many years ago when I planted this rock-seat into the slope behind our house, that the meaning it held for me then would arc over two decades. The longing and devotion imbued in that ritual is now weighted with poignance; it still lives in my chest.
We’ve just said goodbye to our home of twenty-four years. We’ve left that chapter and all the stories we lived, embedded there. We’ve left as well, a sense of belonging within a vibrant community; a community with which we felt immediate kinship upon our arrival in 1996. We’ve left a place where close and loving friendships took root and deepened over those years; friendships that held us through times of trauma and celebrated with us our joys. We’ve left Avalon Beach. Avalon gifted our family beyond measure: it gave us a ‘sense of place’. Avalon is so lush with natural beauty it fosters daily exchanges of spoken gratitude within the community.
The physicality of living there, within our home and in Avalon; the history of our little family of three, has been transmuted these last few months into memories and photographs, and as-yet unsettled feelings of loss. And into an abiding sense of ‘beloved’ that I will set my compass by for the rest of my life.
I had heaved that stone into place flat-side-up and dug it well into the slope so it would make a sturdy seat; a little rock-seat for a child. I imagined her sitting there in the sunshine, having chats with me through the window, while I worked inside at the kitchen bench.
What is it to leave a place, to leave friends; a life – all cherished – not to get away, or even to exchange for a new chapter, but simply because ‘It’s time’?
It emerged as an imperative; a directive from my psyche over the last two years – to relinquish the familiar, the daily rituals, and the physical structure of my life. Inner tides were seeking an unfamiliar shore and an unfamiliar rhythm.
To be clear, it’s not like I’ve given up everything to wander like a devotional monk – although there is devotion for this path. I have Robin, my Life-travel partner near me, responding to his own calling for a journey. So we are sheltered within the bonds of companionship and shared values and our shared thirty-year story. And it’s not like we’re heading to a cave to meditate in solitude, although there will be more time and space to meditate, and write, and exchange daily routine for the following of an internal beckoning.
Not since my early twenties – my ‘backpacking chapter’ – have I woken not knowing what the day will hold. Or not known where I will be in a year, or when I will next live in a place that’s my ‘home’. There is, for me in this moment, a sense of welcome and lightness in that void; I trust it.
We didn’t have a child then, when I built that rock-seat outside the kitchen window. We had been struggling to have a child for many years, and we’d started to face the possibility of never being parents. That stone harboured my longing. Digging it into the slope was a ritual of faith; an offering, a calling for the soul I imagined to be our daughter. The stone also harbours the joy of that moment when we knew our child had found a way to us. It harbours the fulfilled wish, and the memories of her perched there in dappled afternoon sunshine, in animated exchanges with me through the open window; the circle completing. It harbours my gratitude for having had a beautiful soul to nurture and raise; for our little family that might not have been. That is one little seat of significance. It’s one of many touchstones imbued with story – our stories – in the home we’ve left.
The day will come when no longer will anyone know what the stone in the slope means to me, and will mean, until I die. No longer will anyone know that her placenta is buried under an angophora tree in the garden. Or that the beautiful frog pond up the back was built by Robin with her determined help when she was three, in the hope that frogs would come…and they did. Or that the last time she ever left the house, at twenty-two years of age, she wrapped her arms around the grown-huge angophora, resting her head against the trunk to say goodbye to ‘her’ tree, and to her life-long home.
To leave behind all of the touchstones we inscribed with our initials, all of those little altars of devotion, is that to forsake them? Will they still resonate with our stories without us to tend them? The glow they emanate for us will surely grow cold when we are gone.
I’m reconciling with the internal urgings to leave; to venture into an unformed next-future. A rite of passage? A life-stage? A gut-feeling? My grief is deep. Yet an emerging sense of disencumbrance sets my spirit alight. I would not have met this place – where deep sadness anchors a ‘lightness of being’ – had we remained in our home, living within the ongoing structure of our every-days.
Perhaps therein lies an answer to my question – ‘What is it to leave the beloved?’ Perhaps it’s in the leaving that I will come to grasp the meaning of this story; to be able to share it, and so to honour it.
Subscribe to this Blog