We Could've Ended It Then.

Moving through doubts and grief to love fully (+ upcoming events)

Hi there.

I’ve got a little reflective essay and prose poem about relationship grief for you below. Scroll down to get to that heartfelt reflection, but first, a couple…

Upcoming Events

1. Edible Forest Tour, this Sunday, June 15

This Sunday, I’m hosting a special Father’s Day edition of my Edible Forest Tours at Lost Valley Ecovillage & Education Center from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. In an atmosphere of ecological devastation and chronic disconnection from our bodies and environments, these inter-generational tours are a marvelous way to empower your knowledge about edible wild plants while also reconnecting to the many forms of nourishment — emotional, physical, spiritual — some mindful time in nature can offer.

If you want to build more nature connection into you or your family’s life but struggle to start or maintain consistency, this is for you. Prices are sliding scale, with a special $10 discount for anyone who books by this Friday, June 13:

• $60 per person if booking alone

• $50 per person for groups of 2-3

• $40 per person for children and groups of 4 or more

• Returning guests: get $5 off for referring a friend.

If you feel called to attend but have trouble affording these prices, please contact me and we can work something out. Access to this knowledge matters and I’m here to help create community around nature and creativity.

Secure your spot before spaces run out on my Calendly, and message me with any questions.

2. Write Back to Your Inner Nature Retreat, June 18 - 21

I’m beyond thrilled to be teaching a course with my local literary nonprofit Wordcrafters with Jeaux Bartlett, focused on connecting to your body and natural environments as a means to unlocking creative writing potential.

Here’s a snippet of the course description:

What if your best writing isn’t in your head—but waiting in your body, your breath, and the trees around you?

This world is fast and noisy. Even when you want to write, it can be hard to find space to slow down, breathe, and listen to what’s inside you. Even when you manage to carve out the time to write, you might sit there feeling self-conscious, stuck, or your inner critic just won’t quit.

This retreat is a gentle invitation to step away from the noise and into nature—to come home to your body, your breath, and your creative voice.

Over the course of three and a half spacious days, you’ll have space to write freely, move gently, and rest deeply. You’ll spend time in community and time outdoors, soaking up the beauty and rhythm of the natural world. You’ll learn simple tools to ground yourself when your mind gets noisy—and ways to let your writing flow from a quieter, wiser place within.

You don’t have to be an experienced writer. You just have to be curious, open-hearted, and willing to explore.

We’ll write together at the Wordcrafters studio and out in local natural areas like McKenzie River Trust lands and Wellsprings Friends School. There’ll be time for solitude and community, writing and resting, stretching your body, and your imagination.

For more information or to register, visit Wordcrafters.org. If you have trouble affording it, apply for a scholarship.

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Waves of Grief, Drowned in Doubt

Things don't always end on the time frame we expect. Take relationships.

We may enter into them thinking we're looking for something casual, and find once we're in them, we don't want to let go. Or we may commit to one as the one, which we aim to sustain our whole lives and even spawn subsequent generations, only to realize somewhere along the line, we need to move on.

When we do, even if it's the right move, the end of that relationship is a loss, and loss comes with grief.

In the past year, I've interfaced with grief in depths I never knew before. I had to, as I got out of a relationship I believed to be the one, and rushed into one I believed to be casual, which turned into anything but.

In order to love again, I've had to face grief through all the forms it arose in. Like waves of an ocean I could easily drown in, if not for the life preservers I found from others who had been through comparable losses, who reached out and held space even when I didn't know I needed it, or I felt it was somehow "too much" to wade into these endless depths amongst other people.

Yet by overcoming these doubts, I found myself loved, supported, and held by more people from more directions than I ever could've expected. By stepping away from the comfort zone of a relationship that, while beautiful, was no longer supportive of our mutual growth, I had no choice but to depend on the kindness of relative strangers — and it paid off in dividends, revealing the richness of natural healing and human kindness I could’ve only imagined before.

Grief is a dynamic process, meaning it can look different at different times for different people, manifesting many emotional and physical responses. It’s not all crying and sorrow — sometimes it’s dancing, laughing, swimming; or anger, disgust, ecstasy.

One of the most difficult ways grief manifested for me was doubt. In response to the visceral heaviness of grief, at times I wanted nothing more than to go back to the security of my lost relationship. The other relationships and joys available to me then felt like chores and looked like delusion.

My mind wandered back through fond memories and wondered why I had ended things in the first place. Or, in contrast, I remembered all the "close calls" we had had of almost ending things, and wondered why we hadn't just ripped the band-aid off then and let ourselves begin the convoluted process of moving on sooner rather than later. Why now, and why not then?

It's in my nature to ask why. I can't deny it. Yet, in pivotal moments of change, it's also in my best interests to surrender to not knowing why. Maybe someday I can put words to it, as is my wont as a writer, but in the moment, I must just feel and accept it first.

Our conscious intelligence is trapped in time, striving to find perspective above whatever emotional wave we currently find ourselves embroiled in. Despite these fluctuations in our existential climate, we can trust and occasionally glimpse the greater forms of intelligence watching out for us.

We can access this transcendent intelligence through practices of devotion, internal dialogue, ritual, and deep listening to what our bodies and intuition have to tell us, even when it isn't pleasant or aligned with what we wanted and planned for.

Such as in times of deep grief. Usually, loss isn't something we want, but it's what we need to enable life to keep moving, to keep changing, to keep growing. Moving through it is an act of faith.

When I didn't want to move through anymore and doubted there could be a satisfactory reason for this heartbreak, I felt comforted by the Taoist wisdom that the greater the doubt, the greater the faith. The greater the grief, the greater the love. We might not even recognize how deeply we loved until feeling how deeply we grieve. Then I knew there would be a light at the end of the tunnel, a sun-kissed shore on the other side of the dark and stormy seas.

None of us can do it alone. We need tools and spaces to teach us that, despite our pride, we are not the first to experience these feelings. Though it may hurt to go through grief, it's far worse turning our back on it, because then our emotions and creativity become stagnant. We dam the waters of our hearts and limit our capacity to give and receive love going forward.

That's why I keep writing my grief. That's why I keep stemming the internal dialogue inherited from an emotionally neglectful over-culture that any feelings that beg for expression are somehow "too much," for myself and others whom I recognize quashing their right to feel in the same way.

Swimming through grief takes time. But because we all love, we all lose, and we all grieve.

Today, as an honoring of what I’ve loved and lost, in the spirit of solidarity for one of the most acute losses we can go through as humans, I'm sharing a prose poem/micro essay about one of the close calls that sticks out in my memory from my marriage. I hope whatever forms of loss you're going through, it gives you a valuable reflection to know you're not alone, and to find the courage to keep grieving so you can keep loving.

We Could’ve Ended It Then.

“There goes the boat we missed.”

We could’ve ended it then. 
The perfect metaphor was right there,
ferrying across midsummer blue Puget Sound
away from our bench by lapping tideflats. 

But over a tarot reading?
You’d scoffed, like I used to with you. 
I gripped the wheel and took issue.

On the island, unresolved, 
We drifted to real estate window postings. 
Who knew where we’d live in three months?

The other end of the argument, 
stared in each other’s swamp eyes so long
remembered who we’d been orbiting around. 

Eleven years behind us, 
a couple more on the horizon. 

If this resonates with something you’ve experienced or even are currently going through, I’d love to hear it. Saying what you’re going through, even when it’s hard, isn’t a burden. It can be a service to let others know they’re not alone.