"Dreaming with a broken heart"

I have been shown the impermanence of all things; dreams, desires, goals, people, relationships, ideas. The grief and mourning that comes with the inevitable dynamism of life, love and loss has led me back to my home, a hamlet in Northern Alberta. In brief, for those of you who read my travel blog post in early April, not but two days after that post where I announced so happily that I was awaiting the arrival of my love who would be sharing the experience in Bangladesh with me, he unexpectedly ended the relationship. This, I would come to realize a few weeks later, has been the biggest devastation of my 29 years-long life. Not because I've been desperate for a partner for so long, but because I felt the loss of the long-awaited contentedness and the subtle and powerful confidence that comes with being in love with the person who has committed their life to you, who has promised to care about your life in all its minutiae. I felt the loss of the life we had planned together. I felt the loss of my expanding network of kin that I've desired for so long as a person who comes from a small family. Ultimately I lost all feeling of connectedness for a brief period. For those of you who have felt this place of disconnectedness from EVERYTHING, understand that real grief and mourning surely follows. They will creep up on you in the quiet moments when you least expect it for weeks and months following this disconnectedness and if you don't have tools to work with them in a productive way, it becomes harder and harder to breath.

The few days of phone conversations that ensued during the final moments of the relationship, me in Dhaka and him in Scandinavia, were days where the ground dropped out from underneath me, time no longer existed, all things surrounding me faded into nothingness and it was just me, alone. All things I believed and felt to be secure, safe, grounded were gone in an instant and I was, what felt like, a million miles away and 100 year time-difference away from my dear wise and insightful friends, my family who has been my family my whole life, my dog, my fuzzy housecoat, my comfortable bed, the sunshine, the woods..you name it. I took to my Bangladeshi bed, pulled my mosquito net around me and allowed myself to feel nothing but a numbness. I had no support I could turn to there, no place to "get away" from it all and go for a nice walk, no place to go for a drink (muslim country), a time difference that found me up all night waiting to be able to talk to people at home and waiting all day for people at home to wake up so I could contact them. I barely ate, was barely able to muster up the strength to drink enough water (I owe my health for that week to the woman I had moved in with and had known for but a day when this all happened; a stranger shared her food with me, forced me to eat french fries and apple pie everyday for a week straight and asked me how I was doing multiple times per day..oh yes and I also owe my sanity to sleeping pills and the bottle of scotch that I had bought for a gift for him upon his arrival which I drank with my apple pie).

With no regrets and with an acknowlegement of my incapacity to continue on with the work I was to do there as I wasted away in my bedroom prison in Dhaka, I asked my employer in Ottawa to get me home as soon as possible and I ended my contract there and made my way back to my parents' place in Alberta. Some would say that I shouldn't have let a man have this much power over me.... I'll know for next time. Even the great pre-feminist feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of "Vindication for the Rights of Women", the mother of the author Mary Shelly, tried jumping off a bridge after a man she loved and followed around Europe for a number of years ended the relationship. Love, or rather the end of love, makes even the toughest, revolutionary, courageous and stongest women mournful for a time.

Here I am, living in my parents' basement (which I'm finding is not necessarily uncommon for people of my age group and educational level...weird). Upon my return to Alberta, after a week and a half of numbness in Bangladesh watching all the seasons of House MD repeatedly, I wept. And I wept some more and I wept some more. I wept myself to sleep for a few nights (way healthier than sleeping pills). I sat with the anger, the frustration, the grief, the sadness, the doubt. I just let them be and I have slowly breathed into all of the negative and have let go of so much and the heaviness has largely lifted. As theologian Matthew Fox says "we pick up our pain as we would a bundle of sticks for a fireplace; we necessarily embrace these sticks as we move across the room to the fireplace; then we thrust them into the fire, getting rid of them, letting go of them; finally we are warmed and delighted by their sacrificial gift to us in the form of fire and heat and warmth and energy".

 My pain's sacrificial gift to me is a hotdog roast. Thank you very much, pain, my old friend.

I spent the first month reconnecting with family, friends and working in a local greenhouse tending to ornamental flowers (not as glamorous as it sounds). I now know how to identify a number of ornamental flower/greenhouse blights as well as a number of species of hybrid flowers. And now, before I return to Edmonton to take up some work at the University as a research assistant, I have the next month free to fully engage in my recovery, thanks to the generosity and caring of my parents' who allow me to live free in return for decadent suppers and desserts which I LOVE doing so the "rent" is cheap. I took up meditating in the last month or so. This, combined with yoga and fairly intense exercise and playing lots of music and also a fourth reading of "Eat Pray Love", were the catalysts initially for bringing up the really deep deep guttaral emotional pain that could barely be breathed out of me when I left Bangladesh. Hope has slowly returned to me. I can genuinely smile and laugh again. But vulnerability, fear and grief creep in for brief moments every day if I lose perspective for just a moment. There is much healing to be had still but I'm on the right road.

 Me and Cubby. She's definitely proving more and more to be my little "Earth Sister".

 My first cupcake making experience: Lemon cupcakes with a blackberry buttercream icing.

My parents' house is on a 3 acre lot outside of town which is quite forested and there are beautiful trails to walk on in the area and wonderful, retired neighbours with beautiful gardens who have time to drink wine and eat cheese out in the sun any given afternoon of the week. I've taken to drinking in the forest, the wildflowers, the birds, trying to identify them all. The delight that this creates in me is the very same delight that being in love created in me. Although this delight with nature is fleeting right now, it helps remind me that the delight I had while being in love with him is still there. It didn't simply come from him but it has always existed. This brings me much hope. Today, as I sat outside reading, I relished in watching a couple of hairy woodpeckers chasing eachother through the woods, my mama hummingbird who is constantly at the feeder, back and forth, back and forth to her nest, a spider dangling from a single thread, butterflies flitting gracefully about and the auburn coloured squirrel who started a staring contest with me. This connectedness, this reminder of life, all life, are so marvellous, so awe-some and so utterly comforting. The fear of being alone for the rest of my life dissipates in light of these moments of connectedness.

Me and mom planted an apple tree. My first tree.