on leaving again, love and loss

 today i am deeply sad about leaving. i'm feeling that ache, that knowing of what i'm losing, what i'm leaving. i was in an uber on the way to the med school. i have a full day. it's monday and kampala was packed. boda's were everywhere, people everywhere, selling, noise, honking, yelling, street preaching. i looked around and realized how normal it all was, and how it looks nothing like the US and i wondered what i'm going to do with all the quiet? with all the whiteness? with all the tidy? and the tears started to come. i don't want to go! came welling up from deep within. 

learning to allow the sadness is very hard for me. to feel it. it's easier to be busy with all the things. selling shadow boxes and pasta spoons and the amazing pots that i've carried with me since my wedding and are just as good. once again making choices about what parts of my past to leave, to sell, to give, (to abandon?)knowing that i am not my things. 

when mike and i were young married people, before we had kids and started real jobs and before i went to med school, we traveled around europe for 5 weeks really cheaply. in the czech republic we found a hand painted pottery bowl that we really loved and we splurged and bought it and carefully brought it back in our hand luggage. we have carried that bowl around with us through our many cross country and international moves and it has broken many times and been glued back together just as many times. it used to be a serving dish for pasta, now it holds fruit or potatoes before washing. it's chipped and full of cracks filled with glue, but it still holds up and does its job and to me, it's still beautiful. 

part of what makes it so beautiful, is that it's still here. it has made it. like us. battered and worn as we are. chipped and cracked. broken and glued. faithfully holding things.. together. 

sadness is something i've spent years avoiding, maybe even fearing because it hangs dangerously close to depression which once, long ago, nearly ate me alive. so to sit with the uncomfortable feelings of grief, or unhappiness and just let them linger, to welcome them because they have a right to come, is new for me. 

today, i am resisting the urge to busy myself with item selling and list making, instead of writing this. rather, i am letting myself remember the oh so many things that i adore about uganda, the things that even the sprinkles of them make my eyes fill up again. and i'm then resisting the even stronger urge to try to fix it by conniving a way to stay- because i know that is not the right thing either. no. i just must sit in the mess of sorrow- which is after all- a part of love and loss. 

we grieve that which had meaning. that which we love.