You Won’t Dig My Grave

I am no weeping willow

I am no fragile flower

To be taken by the frost or by the lateness of the hour.

I have lived in consternation of the road ahead for me

And despite that I can’t see that far, there are things I can see . . .

A new song by acclaimed singer-songwriter Josh Ritter was released just a week ago, aligning synchronistically with a heartbreaker of a breakup and offering up what I know to be true at just the right moment of strength-defining clarity. That moment I’ve known before, when you pull out of the sadness and despair and face your life, sigh a deep sigh, and realize you are here to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, learn from the experience, and begin again.

You won’t dig my grave, you won’t dig my grave, I have lived among the angels, you never were that brave. You won’t dig my grave, you won’t dig my grave, I have been up to the mountain, there are things you can’t take.

To be clear, I am not speaking (via Josh) to my very sweet ex-lover, but rather to the situation, to the seemingly relentless tests of my strength and thorns to my heart. Realizing, though, that I’ve experienced incredible highs and the lowest of the lows in my now 55 years, a little piercing ain’t going to do too much.

I listened to the song on repeat as I walked the worn path around my neighborhood to the open space, finding the little desert blooms thirsty only for the sun, and reminding myself of all the little blessings and the abundance of love that surrounds, regardless of anything I do to invite or deserve it, and that yes, this won’t do me in, I’m all good with this slight step back to move forward.

I’ve not kept up writing as I intended when I started this blog last year. Aforementioned romance took up a lot of time, and miles to get to and fro, so moving the thoughts into my hands and onto a screen went by the wayside. However, the thoughts were a thinking all the while and on the road, and ultimately helped me accept the things I don’t know and trust the things I do. Like, good enough love just won’t cut it for a heart that knows no bounds. Step in fully with me, or don’t step in at all.

In a week or so, I’ll be back home for a whole three years. In all honesty, it hasn’t been the fairy tale you and I imagined. I feel like I am just starting to gather again after a great unraveling that uprooted me from Michigan and all my loves to my great New Mexico land that I approached with such faith in the ground and sky to quickly heal my broken ways. What it offered was more real and ongoing than a happy-ever-after. My heart home has given me an open, comforting, trusting container to do the work, dissolve a bit more, wonder what it is I’m so desperately longing for, and find the ways to balance the searching with the living.

You’ve never been loved the way I have; you wouldn’t understand.

Brian, yes, the universe, you people and this land even more. Sidestepping the shallow grave, I begin again.