When grief is sneaky...

it's hard to name.

It started early last week.

Needing to take longer to rouse myself in the morning. Finding myself more apt to stare off into the distance and less motivated to do the daily cold dipping and meditation practices that help keep my soul watered.

It was grief, but it was sneaky.

My mother will have been dead for 6 years this Thursday. Every year before this one has been one deep grief slog through all of February and most of March. I was sad and yearning for her a lot of the time, and uninterested in making lots of (any) social plans. My grief took up a lot of space, and the practice was in allowing it to, not crowding it or making it feel suffocated. Giving my body plenty of space to feel.

This year I have felt…fine?

Writing that feels flat, but not entirely untrue.

There has been so much to pay attention to outside of the absence of my mother these past few months. My partner and I moved back to the city where I’m from and the process of returning after 10 years has been a slow, multi-sensory landing. Reconnecting with old friends, settling into work, taking long walks through the woods of my childhood, seeing how gentrification has raptured through, all with the backdrop of a highly televised genocide in the background-all of it has been capturing my attention and my heart space.

It’s also true that 2023 was for me very much a year of personal alchemy. Or maybe a truer way to say it is, the alchemizing that my grief has gone through these past 6 years has integrated more deeply. My body feels physically lighter then it has in a long time. I actually feel less sad when I think about my mom not being here. And so I sort of forgot about the slog of February, the big fat GRIEVING sign that I had worn around my neck every year and since 2018.

Until last week, when I started to feel tired. And it was harder to focus. And one night I went to bed in sweat pants and underwear and I went to tour at a yoga studio where I’m going to start teaching in those same sweat pants and underwear, unmotivated to change my clothes or shower until 5 pm.

And it dawned on me that grief was here.