Rituals

“Sooner or later, though, no matter where in the world we live, we must join the diaspora, venturing beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us. We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives.”

-Armistead Maupin

 For JGB

Rituals are important.  Some are deliberately created, and some are created merely by happenstance and repetition. I have a dear friend and we used to have the most wonderful ritual.  We would meet up at a park that had a 4.5-mile loop.  She’d usually come with her husband and son and they would play, gathering rocks and creating adventures and we would go for a walk. Just as we approached the trail, one of us, more often than not me as I am not always great at opening up, would say “you first” and it would begin.  We would have these wonderful, deep, intense, funny, soulful conversations.  We’d talk about relationships, work, friends, parents (both having them and being on), we’d talk about our dreams, our fears, our hopes, our sadness, and our joy. We would hold space for one another and have some of the rawest, honest, and important conversations of our lives.  We had a space with each other where we could open up and show the best and worst of ourselves without fear of judgment or loss.  We are both trained coaches.  We’ve specifically studied how to listen to others and how to ask powerful questions, so that is exactly what we’d do. We could talk about the hard and scary stuff in a completely honest and vulnerable way because we knew that with each other, we were completely safe and always loved.  That doesn’t mean we let each other get away with stuff – in fact, it was quite the opposite.  We held a mirror up for each other, we helped the other draw connections to things and events that may have been discussed 3 years prior.

On these walks, we processed her journey into motherhood and my making peace with not becoming a mother.  We processed childhood traumas and the demise of my marriage and the intense heartbreak that followed.  We talked about her longing to leave Philadelphia with her family and find their forever home. We talked about my fear of never figuring out how to live outside of grief and sadness.  We laughed at the ridiculousness that life just is, and we held each other’s hand when one or the other needed it.  We bore witness to each other’s lives – we saw, and we were seen.

On these walks, there was just a natural cadence that happened – around the halfway point, whoever started the conversation would simply turn it over to the other with a “your turn”.  We’d begin again. We did these walks probably every other month and I know that I always left with some shift in my own perspective, something new to consider and act upon and I would imagine she felt the same. We met in 2008 and we became one of each other’s chosen sisters.  We created this ritual walk together and today, as I took the same walk, alone, I realized just how much I missed her and our ritual and how both grateful I am that she and her husband and their sons found their forever home and how sad I am that their home is no longer Philadelphia.  It never ceases to amaze me how two opposite emotions can hold the same space.

When we choose the people in our lives and how we show up for them, we are choosing to both honor and be honored.  When we show up vulnerably and with an open heart for someone we dearly love, we can create a bond that many miles and too many months apart cannot change.  Find those people in your life.  Tell them that they are those people to you.  If you don’t have someone in your life with whom you can just be YOU.  Find those people – they exist and they are vital for us to feel completely alive.