Time is a Giver

It’s the last scent left on your newborns clothing. It’s the spreading of the ashes of the woman that birthed you. It’s the visiting an empty bedroom upon becoming an empty nester. It’s the little girl in a grown woman’s body mourning her daddy, not because he’s not there, but because she doesn’t know how to be with him now that she doesn’t look like a little girl. It’s the unimaginable being made possible in what feels like the worst of ways.

And when all of that falls at our feet, and we’re forced to get on the ground with it just to make sense of it all, we’re left with the utter sensation that we’ve lost every single crutch we’ve ever used to stand, and that we’ve literally been blown open by Life itself.

This is the part no one can take away.

When we’re just as in love as the day we met but looking into the face of an old man, only recognizable to the heart, or when we’re just as blown away by the man who once fit in the palm of our hand as we were the day he was born, but it’s too odd, too out of place to see the face of our baby still plastered somewhere in the face of a new man.

This is vulnerability.

This is the expanse. When our walls have been blown through, when our “not by the hair on our chinny-chin-chin” isn’’t forceful enough to keep the big bad wolf of time out, we’re left naked and exposed without the old straw house to keep us hidden. 

Like the painful contraction of a woman in birth collides with the most subtle of natures openings, this part is where the pain of the journey, where the bare bones of “it is what it is” precedes the fruits of our labor.

We can freeze a billion moments in memory but time keeps slipping through our fingers and to the feelers, it’ll never be enough.

When life has us on our knees, whether through true loss or loss of old identities as we journey through our own consciousness, or loss of chapters we’d wished we could’ve spent eternities rather than decades in; exposed, stunned, but somehow too mad to be afraid, we’ve arrived. 

We can anesthetize all we want, but like the body remembers birth whether the mind was aware during it or not, the soul remembers that which we long to forget.

This is the part when we say with what feels like our very last breath, “I can’t…” (let this go, do this anymore, be here through this…)

And right after every ounce of the old us lets the “I can’t” have its way with us, a subtle opening stretches us a bit further, for that final push, where we move from “I can’t,” to “I can’t not,” stand up, and give birth from a full belly what was once an empty vessel of no-thing but potential.

I believe the only things we truly get to keep for eternity are the things we give birth to, whether its a human, an idea, a business, an expression of art, or a new perspective.

I look around as time moves people I love, who can’t find a way to catch up with it, and all we can see is loss; the death of the old. 

We forget that birth is the beginning of all the things we’ve ever wanted to keep. 

But the soul, the soul knows of only birth. To the soul, everything is gained, and not a fiber lost.

I stood on the same beach I went into labor on four years ago last week.

I ceremoniously got into the dark, powerfully deceptive ocean my father once threw me in and screamed “shark!” while he ran in the direction of shore without me. 

I’d swore he’d just thrown me to the sharks. (If you’ve read Imperfectly Sane, you know the profundity of this story for me). 

I took a piece of my flesh and blood, now considered a dead thing, the last bit of the placenta that sustained Cy for all of his months living under my heart, and I threw it to the sharks with my living baby in my arms. 

I gave a literal piece of something I’ll never be able to love more than I do in this moment, and gifted it to my greatest fear.

“Why?” 

Because as time slips through our fingers disguised as a murderer, we’re bathing in the piss of dinosaurs, joined in union with all things that ever were, which didn’t end in death, but began in life.

Time appears to be a thief, but time is a giver, if only, we’ll receive. 

We are not creatures of time, but of the eternal, connected through her, not to her.

What we’ve lost, was first gained, and for this, I will always be grateful, even...when I’m asked...to let it go.