A peek into my next e-book on creating Community

Grief Alchemy in Community, a rough draft

I always like to dabble in sharing rough versions of a chapter that will be in my next e-book. This one is all about curating a community in Maine. My first and second e-books are out there in the virtual landscape and this third one making its way this Fall feels right on time.

Seated here in our new home in Colorado, the chapters have given me moments to re-visit my Maine life, as Anaïs Nin says “we write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect”.

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Chapter ###
Grief Alchemy in Community

Elizabeth Gilbert says, “Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love”.

I arrived in Maine within a haze of grief.

It could have been an amalgamation of things that kept the the mist but I know it started with the death of my beloved maternal Gram in the middle of the pandemic. My paternal Grandma, who I also loved deeply, passed away exactly one month later. I gave both of their eulogies.

There is a waterfall effect with grief, I have found, that I do not need to list here. However, be it a waterfall of events or the waterfall that kept pouring out of my eyes for years in a row, I was sad. And I had never met this part of myself, a really deeply sad version of me.

She shocked me.

And I felt so lost in my body.

Who am I now that I know this darkness?

And do I like this version of me?

Am I willing to get to know her?

While this might feel heavy, I know a lot of you reading this have experienced this exact feeling and self inquiries. Grief is a natural part of the human experience. And yet, we can really only learn how to navigate and grow with it once we actually enter the emotional portal. And I was seemingly stuck at the entrance gates.

While I don’t necessarily recommend uprooting your life and moving across the country as a form of healing, it was the right move for me. When my family and I moved to Maine, my intuition tugged and said this is the right place for right now. And, I let it be so.

One day, I will explain this deeper to my children and I will thank them for being so agile and open to leaving their own communities they had in Colorado, the state they were born, to try on an adventure in New England.

There were many a-ha moments in moving to a place where not a soul knows you or has their grips on any notion of your past, however, the biggest one for me was that I could play around with my labels in a brand new community. What I mean by that is when I took my child to a birthday party and she was up in this extra large bounce house slide, a circle of mothers had formed. Because all of our children were in Kindergarten, we all were new to the group minus a few people with the daycare friends and a cousin (New England family lines run deep and show up). Everyone was introducing themselves and when it came to my turn, I introduced myself as Jacki, mother of that child there, as she ran past to climb the slide again, and I am a poet.

The woman standing next to me looked at me with wide eyes and asked what kind of poetry I write. I look back at her with my own wide eyes. I wasn’t going to totally fabricate my experience as I am a terrible liar and I know better in a small town. Truthfully, I had really only begun to dabble in haiku a year prior. I had only recently tested the creative waters of publishing my poems on a public platform. So I told her, haiku.

And the poet in me was born.

Off the screen from my precious lips,

Out loud.

In real life.

In real time.

And for a moment, the grief relaxed the grip. And while I never sent that woman a poem or ran into her again, that did not matter. What mattered is what I discovered that day. I had met a new part of myself in that circle of mothers and I became a poet in Maine to anyone I met.

And holy hell, I liked her.

She was brave.

A little wild.

A little reckless.

And my question is this, did I become the poet or did the new community allow me the space to be someone completely different out of any box I had ever stood in before?

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