begin again (again, again)

(Santa Fe, 2025)

And so: begin again.

if we are lucky, we get to begin again over and over. What we begin we then continue for awhile and when it comes to its natural (or sometimes less-than-optimal) ending place, we stop. Maybe we rest. Maybe we mourn, grieve, sing, celebrate, remember, or try and forget. But after awhile, when we are ready (if we are fortunate, we get to wait until we are ready), we begin again. 

Maybe we begin again to do what we had been doing previously. Maybe something new has arisen for us. In any case, we are stil here, we are still breathing, we are still healing and growning and becoming and we get to begin something again. We get to keep beginning.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot during these months of quiet and transition. It’s spring again: The robins are back and they’re awaking the neighborhood. The cardinals are still quiet, and the clouds are becoming visible as the sky begins to lighten. I  have candles lit near me and there’s no one else here. No one at all. My beloved is away for work and my familiars have gone.

I have not awakened to write in the morning to this kind of quiet since April 2011 – fifteen years ago.

(Lookit us, way back in 2011)

Just a couple of weeks from now will be the fifteenth anniversary of Sophie’s adoption day; on that day, my life opened toward something I could not have imagined. And now here I am, in a small ocean cottage back in Maine, listening to robins and waiting for the sun to show itself on the horizon so that i can take myself down to the beach and try and rebuild — is that the word I want? Restructure? Relearn what it is to walk early? But there’s no “re” about it – this is not a relearning, but a new knowledge: walking on the beach at dawn has only, until now, been with my puppy. And now she is not with me anymore. So when I go down to the beach alone and she is not there in her physical form, I still grieve. It’s been 5 months since she died, and I am still getting acclimated to living without her. Now that Maddie is also gone, the aloneness has taken on new dimensions. 

Here is the cardinal now, joining the robins. Everyone is calling up the sun – or looking for a mate – or maybe those are one and the same.

So I will go to the beach and walk because Sophie taught me that. Sophie taught me that it’s worth it to get up before the sun and then leave the house and say hello to the world. Sophie got me here to this beautiful place, in the world and in my life. I don’t think that’s overstating anything. There were months over these past 15 years when I only left the house because of her. Months when I got up out of bed because she needed to go out, she needed to be fed, she needed me. People – other humans –  can understand that you are depressed or lost or struggling. They might not like it, they might worry about you, they might want you to do something different, but they understand. They *can* understand. Dogs can’t, not the same way. They need to be taken care of, and you’re the one who has to do it.

So I got out of bed, I went to the park next to Lake Merritt or up the hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge or, now, to the beach in Maine. And she got me to smile, she got me to laugh, she got me back in the present when my brain wanted me to be anywbere but. 

And so now this is my present, without her: I will write this, and I will blow out the candles, and I will put on my shoes and walk down to the beach. And because I’m alone, I will talk with her, and then I will cry. I will look to the places she used to sniff, the places she used to dig her ball into long trenches (in the dry sand) or little pits (in the wet). I will see that those trenches and pits are not there, and I will look around to see if I can catch any glimpse of her. But she is moved on. She is doing the next thing in her existence, I can only hope. And I will remember her and walk at sunrise because she taught me that it was good. And I will come back home and keep on beginning again. 

I hope you do, too. And I hope you are still being easy with you –