I wanted to share from something I wrote a few years ago. It is from my walking journal that I kept when I was living in Tacoma Washington.
I had just returned from Hawaii once more. This was a year and a half before I moved. I was keeping my dream alive just with my energy. I had no idea of how I was going to get where I wanted to go; looking back it is still amazing to me (I’ll write about that story another time). My answer to not knowing was to walk and take in everything around me and appreciate it so that I would not be leaving something but moving into the next place I wanted to appreciate.
There were at least three interesting parts to this specific walk, since it is Father’s Day today I will share the part that eventually touches on that. My father made his transition back in 1988 but reading these things brings the feeling of him to me again.
It was a day of being in the midst of milestones.
The tide was out; farther than it has been so far on my walks. I wondered where the water goes when it goes away. I felt the water was farther away than I wanted it to be; I walked nearer to the edge to get it closer to my senses.
I saw the pilings that are normally hidden and the places under the buildings which are built over the water, that don’t all meet the ground. I wondered about how long they will all stand there.
Since the water was out I saw a stream flowing into the bay that is also normally hidden and I also was able to see the Canadian geese who were gathering at that meeting point of fresh and salt water.
-Hawaiian chants in the headphones giving me chills, as I felt my own movement toward fulfilling a dream; and the feeling of looking at it as an expansion not a leaving behind.
-Feeling the air in its shift into fall. Smelling the August leaves and the blackberries within them. Knowing I would come back here if only just for that smell and feeling.
–a family at the park, the father helping his young daughter learn to ride a bike without training wheels, watching him show her and then holding the seat as she rode. It felt like the last moment before she would be riding on her own; that sweet poignant time.
Sensing her frustration I wanted to help to somehow tell her that she would be riding soon; and I was reminded of my own father helping me and how it felt at that moment when I had started to ride on my own, without even knowing it. And then that moment when I realized I was doing it all myself.
That moment that changed everything.
I found myself thinking of my dad and loving him and remembering again, that right where I was walking; that manicured strip by the bay; was once just a long patch of gravel along side the water. It was where he taught me to drive a clutch. I got another new sense of the things he taught me in my life. It brought tears to my eyes in a good way.
And then seeing the girl on the way back by. I could see that in the time it took me to take my walk she had already gotten stronger on her bike and that her dad only had to hold on from the back of the seat. I sent the girl some good balance and grounding energy and imagined that she thanked me (all non-verbal) and I knew she was so close.
Now as I write this I had yet another perspective, this time from the Dad’s point of view. Seeing that moment from the other side where there is the caring and love in the instruction and then the joy in the success and then also that moment where the success marks a rite of passage and so some moment of transition from one state to another. The act of letting go of that bike the sweetness and the tinge of sadness in it because of the inevitability of the child moving forward and into a new future of their very own.
It had never occurred to me that this might have also been the perspective of my father in any of the things he was teaching me. It was (as is right) just my job to want to move forward. His was to hold the seat and know when to let go.
Aloha and Blessings,
Erika
