The other morning I was on my bicycle, Letty out ahead of me, when a great blue heron came up out of the water maybe ten feet from where I was. If you’ve been reading here a while, you know the herons and I have history. They keep me company along these waters, and they usually announce themselves early, jumping up and complaining long before anything gets close.
This one stayed. Letty had already passed him. He held his spot, maybe even in his discomfort, until I was nearly on him. I was on higher ground, so when he finally flew, he rose to meet my eyes. And for a moment, he did. We looked at each other. Then he lifted off in what felt like slow motion, crossed the field, circled back, and flew over me again, higher this time, speaking with every flap.
I didn’t go looking for that moment. It found me. That’s how most of the important things have arrived in my life these last few years, and it landed in the middle of something I’ve been trying to find words for over.
A few years ago, breathwork opened me up. That’s what the practice does, and it does it honestly. It softens what we’ve kept braced. It brings up what we’ve pushed down. For me it started a fire I didn’t see coming. The life I had built, the roles I had played, the person I had been for decades, all of it began to burn. During this time there was no new life formed yet to step into. Just the space between. Ash on one side, and nothing visible on the other.
Nothing had prepared me for that season, and I couldn’t make sense of it while I was in it, because everything was still moving.
What I remember most is how numb I stayed. Not by accident. I think some part of me understood that if I turned and looked at everything at once, the whole burn, all the loss, I wouldn’t have been able to keep standing. So I kept moving. I powered through. I kept the blinders on, not because I was avoiding my life, but because seeing all of it in one look would have been too much for most anyone. I also noticed that some of that pushing even looked like growth. Another practice, another training, and more work on myself. It took me a long while to see that you can use the work itself as a way to keep running, always reaching for the next thing instead of letting the last one land.
And into that numbness, small things started finding me.
A hot soak with epsom salt and a few drops of oil. Qigong in the morning, with slow movement, nothing fancy. A little tenderness for a body that had been braced for years.
I couldn’t have told you at the time whether the bath was presence or escape. Honestly, I still can’t entirely. I think it was both, in the same water, and in the same hour. What I can tell you is what each one actually was underneath. They were a small dose of feeling. A test. Can I feel this much and not come apart?
And I could. You feel a little, and you don’t die. I’m being a little facetious when I say it that way, and I’m also being exactly real. Every time I let a little beauty in, a little warmth, a little comfort, and survived it, something in me grew back. Not all at once. By teaspoons.
That’s how a person comes back from the ashes. Not by facing everything, but by teaspoons.
Somewhere in those years I learned the thing nobody tells you. How the practices that open us, also need practices that hold us. The breathwork world talks beautifully about transformation. It says much less about what happens after, when the old life is smoke and the new one hasn’t arrived. When you’re standing in between wondering what just happened to you. It can be a lonely stretch. It was for me.
I’ve been writing in this space for almost a year now, and this piece begins something new. Its the beginning of a series about the practices that held me. The ordinary ones, such as walking with beads moving through my fingers, or finding the breath you can carry into a hard conversation.
Water and salt. Slow movement. Small anchors, one at a time, and each one told the way it actually happened, why it found me, what it did, and how you might begin.
If you’re standing in your own in-between right now, the old life burning and the new one not yet visible, this series is for you. The comments are open, and I mean that as more than a feature. Tell me what’s holding you. Ram Dass said we’re all just walking each other home, and that’s all I’m doing here.
I keep thinking about that heron. How the others lifted off early, complaining the whole way, long before anything gots close. How this one stayed, even when it got uncomfortable, until we were eye to eye. And how, when it was finally time, he didn’t just leave. He rose, circled back, and spoke.
Something in us knows how to do that too.