Becoming a red agate

I know I need to update my profile. I noticed that it says something about my eagerness to find how my younger son will relate to our fishing world as he steps into adulthood. Even though we won't have a chance to find out because of losing him in an accident last year on June 30, I think I know. On June 22, about a week before he died, I received an email from him saying, "i miss it up there. it really is home." So I write this post for the sake of honesty.

I won't write about this loss every time it washes over me, but it seems false to write as if this experience this year is only about this year's wind and mud, bluff and tundra, ups and downs, tides and fish. I find, as I settle into my cabin and its gentle silence, that Alex is with me. I feel him - and the loss of him - in a way that I couldn't in my busy life in Seattle. Right now, it is very heavy. It seems that this is what healing needs - this would be the slow painful wet part of the healing process. As I write, that process too is here with me, along with the glory, beauty, joy, and current pain that this world holds. Until Jeff and Luka arrive next Tuesday, it's me, two dogs, and my big gash of a wound in this beautiful world we are in.

In Alex's final email to me, two days before he died, he wrote this,

"when i first arrived, i had a sharp sense of the eternity that has been pumping through the various expressions of time in all their different forms and generating the variable but acutely consistent forms of life on this island. i think the heat, the lush, and the life formed a sort of symphony that rang out the song of cycles and generations. as an artist looking in, there is depth and beauty to it. as someone living it and not thinking very much about eternity, cycles, and particularly being stuck as just another generation on this eternal god damned island, the depth and beauty are harder to reach.

"something is burning at the base of my throat. some kind of pain has settled there for the moment. it is the same genre of pain i wrote about before. this is hard, but it was supposed to be."

This is the experience I am having here, now. I have both perspectives - when we fish, we are in it, part of the cycle that has been turning for generations and that I hope will continue to turn after I'm gone. And when we're not fishing, I can reflect on it and write about it. I can feel, and try to convey the beauty and depth of it. And at the end of the season, we pick up and leave, stepping out of the cycle. (For me, that part of the process is difficult and feels a little like stepping off a moving four wheeler.) And now, this year, something has been burning at the base of my throat; something has settled there. This is hard; I can't imagine it could be otherwise.

The first agate I found this year was a dark red one. Yesterday's photo shows you that they can also be clear, white, or various shades of yellow and orange. I don't find the red ones very often and they are my favorite. I related to that dark red agate and thought it was fitting that it would be the first one that I find. I'm not sure what makes the red ones red - probably some type of mineral inclusion. And that's what's happened to me, too, though it's not a mineral that I must include in my being. I don't really know how it works, but I hope that when I have made it through the process of inclusion, Alex will be part of me in an integrated way - in my thoughts and movements, in my feelings and expressions. Maybe I will do the human equivalent of turning from a light yellow agate into one of those deep red ones, thanks to grief and the Alexation process.