Riding the flow of comings and goings

I awoke to another grey very rainy morning.   The mood was velvety blue deep solitary kind of empty and alone.   I was aware of my body like an ocean tide being pulled between awakening/present/life and the past/slumber/dreaming/remembering/longing, today my nephew and his daughter will catch their flight home.   It will be sad but life is full of endings and leavings and its not the end.  I need to remember that.

We watched the movie Red Dog last night.  For those of you who are not in Australia and don’t know it, the story is based on real events about a red kelpie that lived in the Pilbarra area in remote Western Australia and roamed far and wide catching lifts from strangers.  In the movie he finally bonds with the driver of the mining bus that drives the workers to the rigs and work sites when the driver rescues him from a pub where the miners are using Red Dog to make money, placing bets on how long it will take him to eat a chicken.   A fight insues as the bus driver tries to save Red and Red defends him.  I don’t want to ruin the story for those who haven’t see it or read the book, so stop reading if that is the case, but in time Red’s adopted owner dies after a motor bike accident and following his death Red sits on his front porch waiting for him to come home for three days, he then begins to wander the country high and low looking for him even boarding a boat to Japan (according to local legend).

There is something in this movie that will touch you deeply if someone you loved has left not being able to explain their absence and the bond or attachment that connected them to you was profound.  When the movie came out I had been travelling in Western Australia with my ex partner and heard about the legend of Red Dog.  We ended up breaking up just before the movie was shown in my home town.  I took my sister who was disabled to see it.   I used to take her to the movies often, so watching the movie last night with her son and his daughter was profound and tapped very deep levels of loss for me in two central relationships.  My ex partner had a lovely dog called Sally who I was so bonded to, when I left them both at Christmas in 2010 I did not know I would never see Sally again.  I often wondered if she missed me as much as I missed her and wondered where I had gone when he broke it off with me just after Christmas, angry I had come home to visit a cousin who travelled over from Holland to see us and annoyed I was not back by his birthday.  I had left him alone too long.   I know it hurt him.

Anyway I woke with this going through my mind this morning.  I was aware of the love longing that makes us feel sad when its time to part from loved ones, most especially when we have shared such tender quiet and loving moments.  I was aware of all the years of hearbreak that can ensue when we lose someone we love.  I will treasure for years the four days we have had together, but I know there is also a time to say goodbye and its hard as I know I will wake up all alone in my house tomorrow and it will feel emptier for their absence, the disruption to my routine and the mess could be a bit annoying at times, but I see they are just incidentals to being with the ones I love.

And that reminds me how sad I feel at times that over years I chose a very solitary alone option for myself.  There was a time when the thought of being in a relationship was too much and being out in the world relating was too much, I had so much inner work to do. I just know for me, that was not possible to do while in a loving relationship.  On one level  I must, as I look back, have felt so unsafe and under threat, having undergone so much loss I wanted to protect my heart but I ended up alone, but then I am aware that a deeper loneliness comes from not being connected to my soul.

When I did try to make a new relationship from 2007 onwards my partners comings and goings were hard for me, too.  He was often gone in the early morning even on weekends to go surfing and did not come back for hours.  I did not know how long he would be gone and after an hour and a half I would be triggered.  I would feel angry, paralysed, powerless and helpless and then often there were emotinal storms when he returned.   I was told early on in that relationship that I would always come second to his first love surfing.  For a person who was not anxiously attached that may not have been as much as a problem as it was for me.   For me it was a trigger but I also felt when he was gone he was not coming back, which was probably a sign that at that time I was regressed.

I am glad I could get myself out of bed this morning with a minium of pushing and pulling.  I need to face the goodbyes of today and I also have a therapy appointment in two and a half hours which I was tempted to cancel so I could spend more time with my nephew and his daughter.  I need also to be conscious of his feelings and his young daughters feelings  They have a trip home late in the day.  They will be met at the airport by his wife and son.   They will go home to family.  But he is also going home to an operation.   I want to be there for him, but am sure its something they need to go through as a family.  I think it was such a deep longing that brought him all this way down to see us.   I just hope we have been able to give him as much as we could to know he is loved and precious to us.

The other sad thing is that my older sister who is still alive goes for follow up tests today, they have found white spots on her breast and she had breast cancer just over 2 years ago.  I know she feels the cancer had returned.  She is going for the tests alone, she did not tell me when she knew my nephew was coming as I think she felt it would all be too much.  I came to see last week sometimes when she doesnt make contact there is a good reason.  I get all upset she never calls.  She finds it hard to reach out.  All I know is that life and relationships are so complex when it comes down to connecting and feeling attachments and I am not even sure if that is the right word.  How do we connect without holding on too tight to someone?   How do we connect, yet still remain our separateness as ‘other’ while allowing others theirs?  Is there a vaster deeper place where we are all connected energetically and felt regardless of day to day connections?   So many questions.

In the end I guess each of us works through and understands these desires and needs and longings and complexities differently  We either react or respond.   We have a mind with which to contemplate it all, though and with Mercury planet of thinking and communicating standing still to look backward in the sign of journies, meaning and mythology Sagittarius over the next three weeks (and at the moment meeting Saturn planet of separation in that same sign) it may be a time to reflect on all of the complex comings and goings, wishes hopes and dreams that flow through us bidding us to reach out, connect, leave and then let go.   Maybe like waves in the ocean we are always riding this tide of energy flowing in and out on some level with these powerful surges that move us and have such deep symbolic resonsances from within,