The Gift of an Empty Box

Breaking the Last Chain - Part 1

Hello, good people.

Per my last post, I have been working through a final obstruction which has been getting in the damn way of my moving on to a new chapter.

The good news (for me, here, us…) is that these next couple of posts roll that boulder out of the way and then it’s on to Tegucigalpa.

[Note: I have no idea where Tegulcigalpa actually is or whether a route to it could be blocked by a boulder, but let’s just assume there is one that could.]

This obstruction… it hasn’t been blocking my passage back to where I was… or back to being myself, being who I am. It has been thwarting my entry into a new chapter different than the last and every one before.

I am, essentially, at a gate with two locks which must both be unlocked for me to clear the threshold.

One lock is personal.

It is my deepest wounds, my oldest injuries, the things that hurt me most and hurt me still. There is no key, there is only healing.

Arrive at it and the lock will let you know.

That lock let me know months ago. It opened.

I cleared away the last of my unhealed wounds a few months ago. It happened on a Friday night at 1:00 in the morning. I had to go through some pictures in preparation for something I was writing. I braced for how I was going to feel in looking through them. I then found them on the backup drive where I stored them away, and… things that would have hurt once simply… didn’t.

I had this settled, peaceful, state of healed acceptance.

Not ‘feeling of healed acceptance’. A ‘state of healed acceptance’.

I had arrived at a place. I wasn’t experiencing a feeling. It wasn’t transient. I knew it. I knew it would persist. It has persisted ever since.

It was a place of healing.

I had arrived at it.

And when I did, I felt it right down to my soul.

I had cleared away the very last thing in a box of darkness.

Every… last… wound…

Dating back to my earliest.

I had poured them all out on the kitchen table and cleared them one by one.

It had been like an inverse jigsaw puzzle where the goal wasn’t to put a picture together but to take it apart and lose every single piece.

The picture was of me at 53-years old still hurt in ways I had just accepted would never heal; identifying too strongly with surviving fires; not really thriving in their aftermath.

The goal was to get rid of all of the pieces that added up to make that picture, and I had done it.

The kitchen table was completely bare.

An ENTIRE YEAR of picking up one piece at a time… Turning them over in my hands… going back to their places of origin… and healing whatever kept them from being released.

Every.

Last.

Piece.

The pieces that were small and specific.

The one that was the size of my entire childhood.

I had released them all.

And…… I……. felt it.

It was the most surreal sensory experience of my life.

It wasn’t… emotional.

It wasn’t… physical.

It was…….. metaphysical.

It was a feeling I can only describe as taking place at ‘the energy level’.

I had this preternatural… I wouldn’t even describe it as peace… I would describe it as ‘oneness with a larger peace’ - a peace in connection with not just my former wounds and the experiences that had caused them but with the people associated with them.

The experience was so other-worldly, it’s hard to describe in a way that conveys it at all, but it was as if I had found a peace about things that were very personal which wasn’t ‘personal’ at all really. It wasn’t just a peace within me about things within me. It was a shared peace with those people themselves…. people I had loved and then lost. It was if we were now in a peaceful harmony with each other.

I had opened the lock which could only be opened by healing… and I knew it… and I felt it… and the feeling was so… total… there was no way I couldn’t feel it.

The next morning, I got up… somehow changed… somehow through to a new place.

Over the 24 hours that followed, I had a series of experiences which were so eerily precise in their reminders of the people I had lost, it was as if I had truly arrived somewhere new and the people I had lost had all come to meet me at the gate.

My father

My mother-in-law

My friend

And then my grandfather

People who could only be called to mind with pain, somehow, in one fell swoop, weren’t just summoned as memories. They were present – and the feeling wasn’t pain; it was the warm embrace of only love.

It was transcendent. It was… otherly. It was a feeling unlike any felt before or after, a sensation which does not occur in the course of regular life – because it is not of it. I will never forget it.

And the reminders over the next 24 hours… they weren’t coincidence-level occurrences. They were eerily precise things which immediately brought someone to mind, but not in that passing, unremarkable ‘Oh, that reminds me of so-and-so’. Every single one connected right to that one person and only that person… and in the strongest way anything could connect me to that person.

And these oddly exact reminders happened… one… after another… after another... after another for an entire day.

They started in the morning. By late afternoon, I was just like “This… is not… a normal day. This… is something else…” and I knew exactly what it was… I had a certainty which transcended… thought.

It wasn’t about faith or belief or rational processing. It was a thing that was simply occurring. I was simply experiencing it. I knew what it was…

…and it was exactly what it felt like:

The veil between us and whatever lies beyond had thinned to bring the people I loved closer to me.

I’ll tell the full story of that day at some point, but for now, I’ll share just one of the four sets of reminders from that day:

The ones related to my friend who passed away last year.

As I’ve written about quite a bit, I spent the last week before he lost consciousness with him. The week had been an extremely intense, sprint to line up end-of-life care and get his family there. I had left on a Friday morning with my friend’s care in good hands and with plans for whatever he might need from there mapped out, available, and in need of only being called in.

One of the avenues I had mapped out as an available path had been moving my friend to a hospice facility focused on compassionate, dignified, end-of-life care if needed to see that he was comfortable and out of pain. Two days after I left, that had become necessary, so my friend’s family went in that direction and took the route I had laid out.

After my friend passed away, I was left with a lingering… worry… about whether I had done the right things, made the right choices... He hadn’t wanted to leave his home. It had been me who had set in motion his move to the end-of-life care facility.

Three months after he died, I was standing in a hotel parking lot yet to check in, lost in thought about the above… and not comfortably. I just had this unrequitable… unease. It wasn’t all-consuming. It was just the low-grade unanswerable that springs from caring about someone and having to make difficult choices which pit what you knew the person had wanted against other considerations.

Mapping out the avenue of moving his care to a specific, compassionate care facility had been one.

While I hadn’t ‘made the decision’, I had made it available to be made…

As I saw it, the ownership of my friend spending his final days somewhere other than in his own home… it fell on me. It had been my doing – and that just didn’t sit with me peacefully.

That day in the hotel parking lot, I had been thinking about just that. Specifically that. Feeling unsure of whether I had done what my friend would have wanted… feeling insecure about whether my friend would be okay with what I had done.

Eventually, I snapped out of my thoughts; grabbed my bag out of the car; and walked into the hotel to check in. After I signed for my room, the clerk slid my room key across the counter in one of those little paper sleeves with the room number written on it.

Minutes after I had been ruminating over whether my friend would have been okay with my choices, I check into a hotel with a few hundred rooms and get… that one.

813

August 13^th.

That was my friend’s birthday.

His birthday was the easiest of all my friends’ to remember. It was four days before mine.

When I turned over the little sleeve with my roomkeys and saw ‘813’, I took it as an answer to my question.

Once I got in the elevator, looked up as if looking at the sky, and said a silent “Thanks, buddy. Thanks…”.

Fast-forward to almost a year later and my surreal day after… arriving… at healing.

By mid-afternoon, I had already had a flurry of experiences related to my father and mother-in-law. I was on my way home from the gym and was already a little head-spinny from the multiple earlier spirit-nudges. The car needed gas, so I pulled into a station...

At the pump, I opened my wallet to get out my credit card…

and…

there was…

the roomkey from a year before.

Still in the little sleeve with ‘813’ written on it.

The thing is, I knew I had kept it…

…but I had taken it out of my wallet.

I had made sure to do that.

It had been in the house. It had been sitting on my dresser. I made a very specific point of keeping it; taking it out of my wallet; and putting it on my dresser in a tray… where I then saw it over and over.

I have no recollection of ever putting it back in my wallet... and I have no idea why I would have.

Meanwhile, beside me, the gas pump clicked off to signal the tank was full.

The clerk walked over, topped off the tank, and then handed me back my credit card and the receipt.

As he walked away, I opened my wallet again to put my credit card back and…

…a fortune fell out.

It just slipped out of a tiny little opening at the bottom of the billfold section and fluttered into my lap.

The opening was only about an inch long and was right in the middle, so when the wallet was closed, it basically folded in half and was too small for anything to fall through.

With the wallet opened, the gap was just big enough for the fortune to slip through.

It did and literally fell into my lap.

With me already on, like, Celestial Dispatch #8 or something of the day, I picked up the little slip of paper like “Ooookay, what is this going to say?”

I mean, come onnnnnnn…

Come… on.

How is that even a real thing that happened?!

And the thing is, I have no recollection whatsoever of having ever seen that fortune before.

I have no idea where I got it or when.

I have no recall of ever putting it in my wallet because I have no recall of ever even seeing it at all.

I had ordered Chinese food – maybe – three or four times total in the prior several years. I had no conscious recall of any fortune cookie or any fortune since I last emptied out my wallet.

The closest I come to a recollection having now thought about this to try to piece together where that fortune came from, is… not really a recollection at all. It is more the vague, hazy half-memory of something which you aren’t sure you didn’t just insert yourself as something that happened… because it must have happened.

I have no idea how the fortune got in my wallet.

But I know that moment at the gas pump was the first and only time it - or any other ever fell out of my wallet - and it fell out that day and at that moment… right after I saw the roomkey.

A few hours later, I was telling a friend about THE ABSOLUTE DAY I was having…

I had parked in a lot behind a Panera and was just absent-mindedly milling about the lot while talking on the phone. As I got to the place where the fortune fell out of my wallet, I was hit by the smell of something… a sudden, strong aroma.

It was the smell of juniper. A juniper bush. Juniper berries. The kind of bushes that look evergreen (I have no idea if they are) with tiny little berries…

…and the second the smell hit me, I thought of my friend… who I was literally talking about at that time.

My strongest sense-memory related to a smell – my strongest association between a smell and a person - is the smell of juniper and that friend.

There is no other smell that reminds me of someone as sharply and as immediately.

The reason traces back to when we were 19 years old and spent a summer working as landscapers together. The owner was a guy in his 80’s. He had contracts with a bunch of little industrial businesses in those kinds of outdated office parks you see with single-story office buildings probably built in the 60s.

The guy was spry as hell but didn’t do the manual work anymore. Instead, each and every day, he would drive me, my friend, and another friend over to some business with a lot of old landscaping and just leave us there for the day. We’d then spend it broiling away in the sun trimming hedges by hand. My friend and our other friend had worked for the same guy the summer before. It was my first year.

My first week on the job, with me being new and gullible, I let the other guys steer me into trimming a particular bush – this huge, overgrown bush you had to reach up to trim. The trimmed bits would fall all down your arms and stick to your sweaty skin. It was a pain in the ass… but there were a lot of bushes like that.

After I finished trimming it up, I had this… itchy rash… on my arms. It wasn’t really much of a rash, really, and it wasn’t aaaaall that itchy. It was just itchy enough to be irritating and annoying. By the time we took a break for water or lunch or something, the itchiness was pretty much gone, but I mentioned it to my friends anyway.

The two of them started just howling with laughter.

Turns out, the bush they had steered me towards was a juniper bush. The irritation is what ya get when you trim one of them with bare arms and have all the bits land on them. The oils from the bush cause an irritation just irritating enough to be irritating.

Pointing me to giant-ass juniper had been a prankish initiation for a laugh. My friends howled. I thought it was well played and had to give them props. My friend and I then laughed about that story for years.

It has been 35 years since it took place. Still, to this day, the second I smell juniper, I instantly flash to that friend and that story. Instantly. Every time.

Standing there in the parking lot… after the roomkey in my wallet… and the fortune that fell out… just as I was telling a friend both of those stories, I caught the one scent that instantly flashes that friend to mind.

I was standing right in front of a juniper bush… and was so close, I didn’t even have to take a step forward to touch it.

I hadn’t even noticed because I was too busy telling the story.

After I got off the phone, I walked back over to the bush, picked a few of the tiny berries off the juniper and put them in my pocket. Ever since that day a few months ago, whenever I go to that lot, I do the same – I walk over to that bush, pick just a few berries off it, and put them in my pocket. Invariably, sometime later that day, I’ll reach into my pocket looking for something and remember the berries. Then, I’ll take one of them out; crush it between my fingers; and smell the scent…

…and just like that, my friend and I are nineteen again.

It is the middle of summer and hotter than blazes. We’re trimming hedges by hand; guzzling down five gallons of water; and sweating it right back out. My friend: looking irritatingly like a character out of a viking movie at 6’ 3” and with hair that had turned a Nordic blonde after we sprayed peroxide in our hair one day… while, I, looked significantly less Thor-ish since the peroxide had turned my hair a disconcerting red.

The roomkey, fortune, and juniper bush. All three of those very specific things had happened in a very tight sequence… and that same phenomenon occurred that one day with other equally specific reminders of each of the other people I had lost.

The first of the two locks on my gate – the one that could only be opened by healing my oldest, deepest, most painful, unhealed wounds - it was now open…

…and for the next day, the people I loved who had gone on ahead…

…it was as if I could reach through the bars and touch their hands.

The pieces I had spilled out on the kitchen table a year before… I had cleared every last one…

And when I cleared the last of them, the universe let me know that I had…

…and my travel would be forever lighter as a result.

And that had been the point.

The universe had tasked me with something necessary for the road ahead…

for traveling it well…

for traveling it lighter by setting down very heavy things which I had long carried.

That box of darkness…

It had been a gift.

The treasure wasn’t what was inside of it. It was what came from emptying it.

Empty yourself of your darkness and what comes is not a light but a lightness.

People whose presence was kept from me by the things in the box…

They draw close.

Because now they could.

[Postscript: When I say there’s a lot people don’t know, I mean… a lot. The past year and a half has been one of the most important chapters in my life. This… was what it was about.

Reaching the point in your journey where you have carried things to their place and can set them down in peace.

It was never about a relationship.

Drama makes the noise. Meaning waits for quiet.

(postscript to be cont’d)]