DPP. December 10. KEL-LORY

i am a proud owner of a little framing contracting company in colorado, kellory. (kellen +mallory = kellory). my father left the company to me and my sis after he died last year. it has been a wild journey learning what it means to own this company filled with people i have known my whole life. saturday we had the company party.  it was good. food, drinks, laughter, toasts. my dad was missing. he always is. but in it i am grateful for the other half of kellory who gets me and feels the same holes on the same nights…

grief visits on saturdays….

living in uganda in the fall has been hard for me. i love the fall, i adore the fall,  and living in a place where the main change in seasons is from hot and rainy to hot and dry, i really miss it.  i find myself thinking of being cold enough  to wrap a big warm scarf around my neck as i shuffle through leaves on the ground and sip a pumpkin spiced latte.   i can smell fall if i try hard enough. i can easily feel the cool breeze on my face as if i were sitting in section 203 in folsom field on any given autumn saturday.

yes, i expected that being here in the fall would be hard but i had no idea that saturdays in the fall would be the days that grief would visit so inevitably… every  saturday morning I wake up with the same thought, “this day should be different.” even living on the other side of the world where i rarely know what any given day will look like i know exactly what is missing, exactly what should be different, what will be missing and different every saturday in the fall for the rest of my life…my dad.

soft showers

“you visit the earth and water it.  you greatly enrich it. the river of God is full of water.  you water its ridges abundantly. you settle its furrows. you make it soft with showers. you bless its growth. you crown the year with your goodness and your paths drip with abundance.” psalm 65:9-11

i was reading these words yesterday listening to the soft rain hit the blue roof of our house. it has been raining a lot here, some say more than it has in the past. the ground is saturated with water. it physically cannot absorb one more drop. in so many ways i think it is fitting…

as the rain came down and i thought about these few sentences reflected in the psalms, i couldn’t help but think about the physical ground where i am sitting… this land of northern uganda and the people here. hard. dry. and yet, right now saturated with water.  after a 20 year old war even the land sees the effects. and as the rain came down i hoped that indeed it was God visiting this land, visiting this people. that he is in the rain that comes down and settles the furrows, providing an abundance of growth and grain, and softening hard edges with showers.

…paused…

wading through water. aruu falls, uganda

wow. it has been a long time…. i feel like the my life has just hit a giant pause button.  from the moment 5 months ago when we got the call that i had lost my father… life stopped. movement stopped. while thinking and ruminating didn’t, writing and blogging did.  so much of life has felt like i have been going through the motions and trying to work out some of the most intense feelings i have ever had. grief has been hard on me. it has paused me.

somehow, i think being paused has been very good for me.

a few weeks back i was doing one of my yoga recordings that i taped before leaving new haven in a back room by myself. it was early. it was quiet. as i settled into the classes rhythm, i felt my body expressing grief and surrender with each vinyasa.  it was hard, but the kind of hard that is good because somehow what is taking place on the outside actually matches what is going on in the inside.

on this particular recording peg was talking during a deep hip opener about taking moments to pause. sometimes, she said, we need to think of our lives like a bottle. filled with water, dirt, sand…and most of the time we are shaking it up. in the shaking everything loosens up and what once was stuck to the bottom all the sudden is flying around the bottle.  yoga is a place where just for a moment we let that muck settle and become still enough to allow clarity in the water to surface.

5 months ago my bottle was shaken, rattled, undone…