Easing the burdens of the soul by moving our bodies in other places...
09/11/2023
After the death of my sister and father in 2007, grief settled in like a relentless travelling companion, self centred and demanding. But my own grief paled next to my mother's who became my first priority. How can anyone survive such monumental loss? She wondered how she would get through the day let alone ever experience joy again. It took every ounce of her courage.
There were months and months of insomnia and tetchiness with my kids. My irritability was both understandable and incomprehensible to two teenagers. To most people, actually. And then at the start of 2009 my daughter, at 18, lost her best friend in a car accident, and four other young people known to her, in the space of four months.
It was a deluge of devastation. A submerging, unstoppable flood in our, ironically, drought ridden part of the world.
For months I had been planning a six day hike with friends in Tasmania, something, anything, to shake off the pervasive restlessness that had seeped into every corner of life. Despite the piling up of death, I decided to still go.
For those six days, I was immersed in a pristine mountain wilderness, no technology, just nature wrapping itself around me, precious friends and my strong, capable body. In that short window, I felt so free and glimpsed both myself returning and the possibility of a new path forward.
At the end of the trail, on the bus ride back to reality, I felt such loss and resistance. I was not ready for home. Six days was nowhere near enough. I just wanted to keep on walking.
For twelve months, I struggled with the same nagging restlessness, wanting to leave my job, my home, everything. I felt like I was suffocating with sadness. By 2010 I knew I had to go. From somewhere came the quote 'You cannot ease the burdens of the soul by moving the body to another place' but I felt compelled to move it anyway and by then could see a way to leave my mother and daughter to the temporary care of others.
I took myself to England walking a solitary 500 miles of the South West Coast Path. Day after day, mile after mile for two months on that glorious Cornish and Devon coastline, the shape of my grief began changing. Immersed in an enveloping beauty, I breathed different air with the landscape, as companion, holding space for what was unfolding and what I was leaving behind.
Absorbed, as I was, by what I was seeing, hearing and smelling, I was not conscious at the time of what was simultaneously shifting within my internal landscape. But months later at home I realised I felt different, was different. Somehow enlarged.
Turns out you can ease the burdens of the soul by moving the body in another place. I had found stillness in the movement and a way to fully inhabit my altered life.