every love has its landscape 🐝

a memory of lavender & bees

The places in which any significant event occurred become embedded with some of that emotion, and so to recover the memory of the place is to recover the emotion, and sometimes to revisit the place uncovers the emotion. Every love has its landscape. Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you’re present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion.

Rebecca Solnit,  A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Sometimes, when grief strikes, the breathtaking sadness forces my shoulders forward and pulls my chest inwards, as if I am retracting my heart from the world. 

I am committed to surviving this era mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I see the Palestinians in Gaza who in an apocalypse continue to strive for life. I want to be like them, I want to be committed to life in spite of a force that is relentless in its tactics of extermination. 

I have been contemplating what it means to metabolize ongoing trauma. I feel like PacMan devouring food, moving through an unending maze. If you don’t keep moving, keep metabolizing, then game over. 

Shifting from talk therapy to somatic therapy has been powerful and so resonant. Yesterday, I shared with the healer the sensation of grief and how it manifests in my body through hunched shoulders, an aching chest, and a sore upper back. I naturally assumed that pose as I was describing it to her. I told her it felt like my heart was suspended in hollow space, like it was all alone with no other organs, tissues, or blood supply to support her.

She guided me to remain in that posture and listen to what it had to say to me. 

After several moments sitting with closed eyes and focusing on the sensations in my chest, I said: 

I resent you. Feeling everything so intensely is a burden. I wish there was someone else who could help me in tending to you. I wish I could drop you off at daycare and get a break from your needs.

I sat with my resentment towards myself for what felt like an uncomfortable eternity. Then, a memory arose. I was transported back to my garden in Ramallah, sitting by a patch of wild lavender. Bees were hovering by the lavender, feeding off its nectar. On the other side of my garden was al-Amari refugee camp. I would often hear the call to prayer from this camp. Sometimes, they would use the minarets to announce the martyrdom of a young Palestinian and inform the community of the logistics of the funeral prayer.

I spoke this memory out loud to the healer. Notice your body now, she said. I was sitting up straight, my spine long and tall and my chest puffed out. What would you say to your heart now?