After Terry died, the stillness before dawn became my church.
For the first few months, every morning when I awoke, I sat in the dark making sure our children had some semblance of a father to greet them. Was I a chaotic mess of missing puzzle pieces, trying to remember where and when I was? Was I blissed out from a dream visit with her, savoring the feeling of being together again? I spent many nights crawling through dank dreamscapes made of sorrow, grief, and anxiety. Those mornings, I didn’t want to hug our two children until I’d had a chance to clear the residue of those lands.
When you have young children to care for by yourself, how you feel each day has an enormous effect on how they experience life. There has to be room for their wings to open to the fullest, whether or not they’re using them for flight that day. They have so much growing to do despite their loss. They need to know the person supporting them has a steady hand and an open, loving heart.
I began to spend every morning going within. After the most intense aspects of my dream experiences had settled, I journeyed into everything bubbling and shifting inside of me. I faced my resistance. I went into the places that hurt. I soaked up the joy, savoring the smells of cedar-soaked desert rain floating through the open window. I held our cats, sinking deeper into the moment.
Eventually, I found stillness.
As months without her turned into years, stillness became my ever-present practice. I could be driving, listening to one of the kids talk about their day at school, but I was finding and sinking into that place. Once you spend enough time there, you know how it feels, how to locate it even when you’re stressed out. You learn to share the peace that arises with others.
I began to understand that stillness was about so much more than feeling at peace; it was about being fully present to the sacredness of being.
Much of what is written in the following poems arose out of my morning sessions. In fact, those times became the time to write, to polish insights I received. The inspiration for some pieces might come on a walk, during my day job, or in any number of moments with the kids, but the cultivation of these poems happened in the terrain of bed and morning. There I harvested from stillness what I might, shaping it into an offering that others might find nourishing and resonant.
I hope these poems inspire the instinct of connecting to that deeper place within. We all have stillness within ourselves, it’s always there. I think we should help each other find it if we can, receive it fully, and live from it.
