I move in and out of melancholy, grief and "not-knowing" as, after 11 1/2 years alone in this orchard, I face the intense and challenging prospect of full-time tenants moving into the big house.

After ten days of heavy ash-fall from the big forest fire just 10 miles away, I’m back, at last, to being able to float in my hot tub while doing my morning Reiki hands-on-body mediation. The stillness is broken by the receding night sounds of cricket and katydid. Gradually the morning bird chatter overtakes the night music. The bees have mostly moved on from the honeysuckle overhead to the pepper tree in front of the big house. This morning’s overhead treat is a hummingbird courting ritual filled with swooping, diving, “treading air,” and much of their wonderful “tsk-tsk ings” all the while. In the unbelievable stillness between, I hear the squeak of a crow’s wing joints as it flies just above me. I feel incredibly blessed and awed.

And, I am feeling melancholy this morning. After months of bearing witness to enormous changes in the lives of both friends and clients, I am now at the threshold of an enormous and disquieting change in my own life. 

For 11 1/2 years I’ve had this rented 6-acre orange and fruit grove essentially to myself. Over these years, the owners have come up to use the big house (barely 50 feet away from my little cottage) only once a month or so and then for barely a day and a half during a weekend. Sometimes friends of theirs have (with forewarning) come to spend a night or two. And, perhaps once a year, the owners have come for “working-on-the-property” vacations of close to a week.  For the rest of this time, I’ve had the magical comfort and blessing of utter and complete solitude here in my sanctuary.

All this is changing this very week. In early October, the owners told me that they probably would have to be renting out the big house for the next 2 to 5 years. They’d had several big changes in their financial situation and were also facing having both their children simultaneously at college for the next two to three years.  In November they began advertising for a tenant hoping to begin the rental in December. They promised that my needs and input would be factored into their choice of tenant. They were clear that they wanted for me to be able to stay.

As with many of their other plans over the years I’ve lived here, this one seemed for quite a while (and blessedly for me) to be coming to naught. And then, in mid-May they lowered the price and immediately found renters ready to take possession on June 15th.

I had asked Spirit to bring us a quiet, reclusive single woman who worked away from home so that my solitude and sanctuary would be the least impacted by this enormous change. Alas, that is not who’s coming tomorrow! 

The people with whom I’ll now be sharing this paradise are a couple with a 4-month-old baby girl. The woman is reclusive, but she’s an herbalist and writer who‘ll be seeing clients in her home! And, for each of the next 5 months she’ll also be doing a weekend symposium with 8 to 10 participants here from 10 till 4 on the last Saturday and Sunday of the month. The husband, at least, does go off to work in town.

I’d met the woman and her baby when she’d come to look at the house and she seemed, miraculously, a kindred soul. Still I felt overwhelmed and devastated at the news of what I would be facing with her actually coming to live here. Over the first few days after the news, she and I talked. She was incredibly sensitive and flexible. She’d already considered my concerns (having noticed the day we’d first met how I’d winced when she’d told me she hoped to be able to continue seeing about 3 clients a day at home.) She proposed a plan for having her practice have as light as possible an impact on the peace and solitude here. Mostly that involved her graciousness in matching her workdays to mine on the every other week that I do work. On the weeks I have no clients coming onto the property and for the workshop weekends, she agreed to have her clients park outside the property and walk in. 

She and her husband are losing a very similar living situation in this same rural part of Ojai. They’ve enjoyed this same sort of privacy and solitude for 9 1/2 years. So, we’ll all be dealing with loss and grief and significant changes as we reconfigure our lives in this new arrangement. 

I know deeply that this is probably the best it can be, given that I am clearly being asked now by Spirit to do the work of trying to share this space. We’ve talked about the fact that after so long here alone, I’ve little sense of how my living might impact on life in the big house. We’ve agreed to commit to communicating directly and forthrightly as we adapt to each other’s presence here so that no irritations get to build up and become toxic. I feel hopeful that we may find our way to live caringly in partnership on this land.

Most of the time I seem blessedly able to completely finesse worrying, anticipating or thinking about how it will/might be. Instead, I’ve been hard at work having a wonderful time designing and building a freestanding privacy trellis-fence for my shade garden. That garden is the only part of my domain that was exposed to the soon-to-be-more-public areas of the property (the two houses are completely screened from each other by plantings). 

And, I find myself doing various other gardening and landscape projects that connect me even more deeply to this land. All the while, I am aware that it may not work to live with others so close by, that I may ultimately find I’ll have to leave this wonderful space. I am profoundly in the “not-knowing.” I am committed to not trying to know or to figure it out before it becomes clear to me. I am intensely into practicing being in just-this-moment, being willing to meet whatever is coming only when it comes.

And, there are moments when an elephant’s foot of grief lands on my chest and takes my breath away. I am bowled over with such pain and such a profound sense of loss. No matter what unfolds, I am losing the special protected ness I’ve been wrapped in for 11 1/2 years. I breathe into the pain, I weep and it passes away for a time. I notice that I’m getting extraordinarily crabby and irritable these days, erupting in streams of furious curses and foot-stomping tantrums at the smallest frustrations. I recognize that this is part of me being with my grief, my rage at what I’m being asked to give up. I’m hating it but not resisting it.  I’m hating it and embracing it. Not welcoming it, but yes, embracing it.

I am enormously exhausted a lot of the time, and I know it’s the grief, not just the physical labor of the carpentry and hauling.  I nap a lot and sleep long hours a lot. 

I’ve become very careful about with whom I share the news. I‘ve been hating any responses that encourage me to welcome change, to trust that good will come from it, to trust that everything will be just fine! When people say these things I just want to spit! I know that they mean well, but it feels awful to be given what feel like platitudes when what I really want is acknowledgment of the hugeness of the loss that this is for me.

I really do know from my living experience that every step–no matter how challenging–always leads to growing. That there is always magic that unfolds in each change. That the next step always takes me somewhere better than where I’ve been (even when that feels utterly unlikely).  But, in this moment, all I want in response to the sharing is an acknowledgment of how grievous the loss feels right now!  A loving “Poor Honey!” (or its equivalent) really does it for me!

Originally published June 2002