Angela and I host a big grief party. It is a tremendous undertaking, and nerve-wracking to host something that feels so different, but I get to cry with old friends and new, I get to be still & quiet and laugh uproariously, I get to feel the relaxation that comes when the unnameable is named and no one runs away.

In my dream, my dad wakes up from a nap, and we’re all surprised to see his eyes open. I get to feel him looking at me for the first time in a while. He says “I didn’t quite get what you were doing with all those grief rituals, but this was good stuff.” Maybe he was actually there.

I continue having meaningful goodbyes with different people, slowing down to look at each other and to say I am so excited to love you from afar. I have gone away for an extended listening tour many, many times, and I notice myself no longer scared to lose the friendships that hold me here. Instead, I take this opportunity to make deeper commitments to the people I love, commitments that will stand far beyond any individual season. 

D, who knows me better than anyone, reflects to me that she can feel how this trip is different from any of the previous ones she’s sent me off on. I feel different, too.

I am reading Bill Plotkin’s The Journey of Soul Initiation, where he names a particular journey The Descent, a walk down into the canyon of the Soul, a threshold at which all sense of one’s social roles and identity are stripped away.

I haven’t released all of my societal roles - still working with a handful of clients, for example - but I do feel a sense of leaving the raging party of my life where I know exactly where I fit in. And for what? Because something inside of me says go on, this is where you’re supposed to be. 

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of listening to that voice so far. 

I can’t confidently say I’m on Plotkin’s Descent, but I can sense a sort of quieting in me. Things that typically get stuck and agitate me feel more fluid. Meanwhile, there is an acceleration of movement and energy to prepare for the departure. 

I go into the Indian consulate in SF to get authorized to take my dad’s ashes to India. It’s a meeting I have been preparing for for weeks, gathering documentation from all over the place (including a hastily shipped OCI from Texas).

The tension is at its breaking point when I read that Trump has threatened to eradicate an entire culture. I wasn’t alive for Hiroshima and Nagasaki but I know what this country is capable of on a lark. 

Despite the layers of asphalt beneath the soil and my feet, I start crying immediately. Walking around city blocks, searching for grief in the faces of the other people on the street. I pass by a restaurant we used to go to in my last corporate job, remembering how we would halt all operations to watch Apple’s latest product launch, but couldn’t stand to make room for grief. 

I look back on who I was five, ten years ago. In many ways, that kid was longing for the life I have now. He was longing for creative aliveness, for fullness of feeling, to be proud of what he was doing in the world. All of that is true, and yet I continue to go onward into the unknown to listen and receive wisdom. 

This time, I don’t know where the longing is pulling me. There are no images or ideas of what’s to come. There is just cool, misty fog. There is the echoing sound of water dripping onto stone. There is the smell of mountain air. There is peace. 

The canyon awaits. And when it comes to leap, I am ready for it.