all stirred up

I cancelled my clients this morning. Nobody needs a therapist who’s breaking into tears unexpectedly. What’s up with me? What has this trip to the coast broken loose in me? This week is the anniversary of my father’s suicide, a time I tend to be battling the blues, so that’s definitely a factor. Reya says I don’t sound depressed, just sad. There’s some mighty grief running thru me, and I’m giving it free rein, not trying to busy myself out of it, or numb it with glasses of wine. Curiously, I find I’m envying LeeAnn her one love, her long years of battling and making up with Max. Maybe, finally, I’m grieving my marriage. I know I’ve grieved the loss of my husband, but the loss of my marriage, that’s another kettle of fish. That marriage had it’s beginnings on the Oregon Coast.

Cannon Beach is such a crucible of love for me. All the great loves of my life, except my last one, hold some history in this place. I went there to heal, drawn by the power of the elemental forces; the ocean, that great rock, the brambles of the persistent blackberries. I also went there to flee the love that I was being offered in Northern California, that I couldn’t receive or let in after my father’s act closed off some chamber of my heart. I’m wondering if some indelible scarring took place in my ostensible healing, and if this trip has broken open that old scar tissue.

It was here in Cannon Beach that I began to work with the tides and the phases of the moon, that my love affair with the Craft began. It was here that I began correspondence with Starhawk, and found out that we would both be going to the same graduate school in San Francisco. Michael told me how he every so often reprints in October the article I wrote for him about witchcraft. We laughed and marveled at the full bookcase of tomes on witchcraft which are now in the store he works at. Even as I write this, I feel the pull and tug of sorrow. How strange to no longer want to attend my local public rituals, to feel embarrassed and discomforted by my association with Reclaiming!

It’s cold and relentlessly grey out. I’m back in San Francisco, gathering the pieces I left on that Oregon coast, trying to make sense of the last few days, trying to make sense of my life.