Summer Meditations

Note: I wrote the following during the summer of 2012. I'm posting it now because I've never known how to end it. But now it's done. And so this is how it should have ended after all.

This has been a summer of rebirth and reconnection for me. I've reached the end of what I hope will be the most personally painful episode in my life. Over the last two years I've had to fight for the custody of my child, and through patient and what I hope were caring efforts, I've won everything I set out to in terms of protecting our relationship. At the same time this struggle has created many casualties along the way. The relationship with my daughter's mother has been strained of course and my daughter has had to grow, endure, and learn to comprehend the world through two parents at war. This is perhaps an innocence most sadly lost. I had so wished it would never have ended that way, but not everything is within our control. The buck doesn't always walk into the clearing, with the wind in your face and the dawn behind you. I have lost years of my own life (priceless), wasted tens of thousands of dollars (stupid) and considerable momentum towards pursuing my personal goals. Most importantly perhaps is that I was finally forced to give up on a relationship that was, perhaps, my last great chance at love as the poets wrote of it.

I don't know if that gets across what an empty, lonely, frightened place I've lived in for the last several years - and the sense of loss I feel coming out of it - but I know I am coming out of it as I'm beginning to let it go. The pain, the victimhood, the sadness. It's all going away, and I am free again.

Why am I talking about this here? This is where I talk about "hunting", right? For me this is about the quest. The quest to find myself, my place in nature, and balance all of that in some imperfect but personally fulfilling way. This summer I've made a number of very journeys that are part of this healing experience - most important of those is the beach.