Returning with New Eyes

This morning I went for a hike out on the ranch scouting my next location for a photo shoot. I started out at a particular dry creek bed. Parked the truck, walked down a shallow slope and stood a moment taking in the world around me. This was where Drew first taught me how to shoot a gun. Back when I was so terrified of them that my hands would shake just to hold one. I have only been back here twice since he died… always I can feel the absence so strongly here. This time was no different.

I stood looking out at the steep slope where old cans and barrels still lay in the dirt – full of bullet holes and rust. It’s an empty place to go to now… with nothing left but these small aluminum reminders of a past life, now decaying slowly in into the earth. It all looked smaller now – the way childhood places look to you when you visit them for the first time as an adult. Only I wasn’t a child when I was here… it was only a few years ago when we last came here together and shot a few rounds. But how strange it all looks now. As if the life is gone out of it. Despite the creek bed being full of winding mesquite trees and dusty green cacti and a hint of the first rush of wildflowers of spring. To see it with my eyes… there is no life in it.

I look down at my feet and notice a few bones, vertebrae of a deer or a hog likely. I have a thing for animal skulls, so my mind is immediately on the search for a skull to collect. I find none… but the thought of one “out there” somewhere ends up getting me wandering.

I follow the creek bed about a half a mile or so – somewhat still looking for a location for my photo shoot… but mostly not. By now the clouds are clearing and the harsh sun coming out – so my chances of getting the light right for the photography are blown anyway. I really do need to start getting up earlier for this stuff, when the low morning cloud cover offers the perfect light. I wander… Enjoying the cool breeze on my skin, enjoying the birds singing all around me, and the crunch my boots make in the residual dead leaves from winter. For a little while at least, I am lost and enjoying it. Enjoying being alone and the feeling that no one knows where I am. Why is that such an appealing feeling? The freedom of it, I suppose.

I find a few more bones… a shoulder blade, likely from a hog, a large femur from a cow long ago passed. No skulls. I find an old dead tree that looks like a cross, and pull my phone out to snap a picture and note its location. It might be something worth capturing in different light. Then I make my way back through the creek bed to my place or origin… listening along the way to a recording on my phone of an artist friend talking about life. He is saying how each day is a new day, a chance to make a new choice, to be reborn. It’s comforting… even as sad as I am today, still this idea is comforting. To even live somewhere where I have the opportunity to choose so much in my life, is really quite remarkable.

I am back at the beginning of my trek before I know it… and as I’m crossing the creek bed to return to the truck, there, right at my feet… is a skull. Wild hog, in very good condition. It is laying only 4 or 5 feet from those first bones I saw, yet somehow I missed it? There all along. I smile, and I think about this all for a while. They say that which we may spend our lives looking for, our peace, our happiness, acceptance, love… we need not search it out, for it is always right where we were to begin with. Sometimes maybe we just need to look a bit closer to find it. But maybe at times we do just need to go on a search outside ourselves in order to return back to our hearts with new eyes. I know it has helped me to do so since he died. It’s far too treacherous a landscape to stay inside myself for too long.

As I returned, and looked around at this place that felt so alone before, it felt different… transformed somehow by my journey outward. I could see it with new eyes that were able to notice all the life around me – the birds, the wildflowers, the insects. Amazing how I hadn’t been able to see any of that before… only the loss, only the memories which I can no longer recreate there with him. And now I was seeing everything else. I suppose sometimes we need a good venture outward in order to see ourselves and our loss differently.

Living Adventurously In Loss

Even though our adventure together did not last a lifetime as we expected - my fiancé and I certainly lived our days adventurously. He convinced me to go skydiving a week before we began dating to my surprise. I am not an adrenaline junky, but somehow he had a way of making me surprise myself by the things he was able to bring out in me. I always liked that. He took me up for several helicopter flights while he was in flight school. He was so elated because apparently I was the only girl who ever accepted his invite to go up with him for a flight - and not only did I accept - I was extremely excited. It's beyond me that anyone would have had any other reaction to someone asking them "do wanna go up in a helicopter?" Certainly one more reason we fit so well together.

In the three years we had together we did lots of other adventurous things. We took a rock star trip to Vegas, took up kayaking together, did lots of camping and hiking, hot air ballooning, parasailing, race car driving school for a day… this was most assuredly NOT the girl I was before I met him. It was the girl I wanted to be - but without the right companion to do it with. I think that is one of my favorite things that he brought into my life - a perfect match for my sense of adventure that brought it out even more so in me.

But that spirit wasn't just in the grand adventures. It was in the little everyday things too. When we took frequent road trips across Texas to visit his family, we would often get off the main highway and take some other winding road we'd never been on. It always took longer, but we saw things we'd never seen before and even enjoy laughing at ourselves if we got lost sometimes.

We were big foodies too. We enjoyed going to restaurants and eating slowly and savoring every flavor - trying to pick out the ingredients we were tasting in each dish. And cooking at home was always fun too. He would find a new inspirations for a main courses, and I would chime in with ideas of what sides would go great with it. We'd go to the store together thinking it out and creating it as we went along, then come home and create together in the kitchen with some good music going - which could be anything from classical to jazz to country or rap depending on our mood. Cooking together was most definitely one of my favorite everyday adventures we shared.

Our conversations were adventurous too… sharing a sharp wit and flair for the sarcastic - we would often lock into an effervescent one-upmanship, trying to impress each other with twists and turns of our humor. A road trip or long day's hike would often result in talks spanning american history, gun ballistics, inspiring new artwork, outer space and the universe, achieving goals and dreams, the rapture of flying and favorite new music. There was never a dull moment and we never ran out of things to talk about.

The joy and beauty that our shared adventure brought to my life makes continuing to live adventurously very important to me. It brought me a profound feeling of aliveness… of being and living fully and deeply in the present moment. Adventure - no matter how big or small - has a profound ability to do this for us. And that's not only possible to experience in the midst of grief, I think its absolutely VITAL. At no other time do we more need the reprieve that a feeling of adventure can bring.

The joy and beauty our adventure brought to my life is also the reason why its so HARD to continue to live adventurously. Because without him here to live wildly with - it can be so easy to focus instead on what is missing. Being unable to ask my partner "Hey! You want to go kayaking tomorrow?"and hear back an excited reply of "Hell yes! Let's do this!" makes it harder to even remember to think about going kayaking (our kayaks still sit in storage collecting dust, 2 years after his death). I've found that my desire to do some of the things we did together just hasn't been there.

But I am still trying to think adventurously like him. Trying to keep the spirit alive inside me… because I know more than anything that he is telling me its time to go out and have a whole new adventure of my own. He is telling me to get out there and keep surprising myself. Even though there are a lot of days when I don't WANT a new adventure. Even though there are a lot of days still when the pain is too great to be able to see that there is still an adventure in this life of mine to be had. Still I never stop trying to mix adventure into my world - I never stop hearing him in the seat of my soul whispering for me to grab life by the horns.

And so I take trips, and I try things I've never done before. This year, I started  giving art lessons to an elementary school boy… something I never imagined myself doing in a million years. Its been rewarding and healing for us both. I also had my first solo art exhibit - a collection of the past 2 years of my photography since his death, a life long dream of mine that has totally changed my whole viewpoint of myself as an artist. And in just a few weeks… I'm blowing money I probably shouldn't be to go with my best friend to Hawaii. Two years ago I'd have been far too frugal to drop that kind of cash just for fun. But I have the money, I want one big travel adventure this year, and dammit I deserve it!

In the life of someone widowed, it can be so easy to become apprehensive… to get caught in a fearful loop of thinking to yourself dreadfully, "What's going to be just around the corner?". Continuing to take chances to see and live life adventurously has been one of the biggest ways of helping me change the whole meaning of that statement to "What's going to be just around the corner!!" To be excited by the unknown instead of paralyzed by it. This is the one of the most life-changing lessons that my fiancé brought into my life, and one that has stayed deeply seated in me even after his death. As he once said "Pain is going to happen. You've just got to not let it get you down." So I keep on trying to not let it get me down - at least not for too long - and I keep setting my eyes towards new adventures. Towards surprising myself pleasantly. Towards hope.