Hello friend,
Why do we stop doing the things that make our soul sing? Is it just human nature? I've been turning that over all week, and I don't think it's only me. I hear it from women all the time. We stop doing the thing that fills us, and not because anything dramatic happened. Nobody took it away. It just didn't fit into the schedule one day. And then it didn't fit the next day. And on and on, until you look up and the thing that fed your whole spirit is gone, and you can't quite say when.
Here's the thing about me. I'm a walker. That's not a hobby, that's just who I am. As a teenager I walked the whole perimeter of our town almost every night after dinner, no earbuds (and no Walkman on my hip back then either), just me and the trees and whatever was going on in my head. I've only been in this house two years, but I had a path like it at my last place too. I step out my front door and there's a five kilometre path through the trees if I go both ways. Part of it runs past an industrial stretch, but most of it is birds and wind and green, and walking like that has been the rhythm of my life since long before either house. I walked eight hundred kilometres across Spain, not because I'm the most in shape person you'll ever meet, but because walking is the thing that gives my soul peace. In my twenties I ran, and I understood Forrest Gump on a cellular level, that thing of just running and not stopping. If I hadn't had a little boy at home to come back to, I think I'd have just kept going. Walking is where my head clears. It's where my ideas come from. It's where my writing comes from, to be honest. This letter is a voice note, recorded on a walk, in the rain.
So how does a woman who is that much of a walker just stop walking? The same way you stopped doing yours. Your thing. The thing that gave your soul peace. Two years ago I had a concussion that flattened me, and somewhere in the long recovery I got quite depressed. About a year later I finally went to Costa Rica to get my yoga certification, something I'd wanted since I was twenty five, and between that flight and a flight to Halifax and a long drive, all inside a month, I set off sciatic nerve pain I genuinely could not walk through. Therapist after therapist, nothing touched it. I was using weed just to get to sleep, so out of it that I'd almost have to be helped to bed, and I hated that my husband and my daughter had to watch me go down like that.
Before the pain ever started, I'd already booked ten days of silence. A Vipassana retreat, ten hours of meditation a day. The pain that no therapist could touch released in there, in the quiet, while I sat still with my own mind. It's amazing what the mind can do when you finally stop and examine it. I walked out of that retreat pain free.
And when I got home, I walked. Every single day, like I'd remembered something. Then winter came. This was the first winter of my whole life where I simply did not want to leave the house. My mother reached a point where she was done with winter and went south, and I think I'm there now. It's hard to admit, but I think I'm there. So I didn't walk. And the not walking got easy to explain away, a trip to Halifax where I hadn't packed the right gear, the cold, the dark, one reasonable excuse laid on top of the next, until it had been spring a good long while and I still hadn't got my butt out the door.
When we stop feeling our soul, we start to lose our joy. The Crone Stories has been feeding mine. Women who were once too afraid to tell their story are reaching out now, wanting to be part of season two, and there is so much soul in that. But this one piece of me, the walker, the woman who needs the ground under her feet to remember who she is, had gone quiet, and I didn't even notice it leave.
So today I just went. Sandals on, rain coming down, a tornado warning rolling in, and out I went anyway. And I'm telling you, within ten minutes, the wind in what little hair I've got, the rain on my face, the freshly mowed grass coming up through my sandals into my toes, I was in joy. I was in peace. I remembered who I was.
It doesn't have to be complicated, the thing that fills you. Mine is literally putting shoes on and walking out a door. I can't think of a lower bar than that. So if you've stopped doing yours, I just want to ask you, gently, why? And if you're one of those women who never let it go, who held onto your thing through every season, I want to hear that just as much. Tell me how you protected it. The rest of us could learn something.
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In love, light and laughter, Karen
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The life we don't examine stays the life we didn't choose.
In love, light and laughter,
Karen