If you are in the throes of letting go, it can feel like without warning the seams of your world are coming apart. As they split, your own skin is removed too. What is revealed, is tender and unsure. The ground below, once a steady predictability you rarely gave a second thought, now wobbles and shifts. 

Perhaps you sigh more hoping to lift some of this heaviness. Or maybe you hold regrets that intermittently darken your gaze. 

It may feel as if you'll dwell here forever. This impossibly baby-tender skin --  that doesn't yet know how to not feel overwhelmed or how to negotiate --  seems an impediment. What a supreme disadvantage to need the light to be a little softer, to need the palm of the world to receive you like a delicate baby chick. 

So you put on your best I-have-my-shit-together face when you must show up for the meetings, engage with the chatty checkout clerks. You hope they don't notice in your use of excessive hand gestures how naked you are. 

When that performance is done, you tumble exhaustedly to your bed or couch and curl into the safety of that womb.  But there are feelings of defeat. Who are you to turn off your phone and shut out the too-sharp world? You better have a good excuse. 

Let this reminder be your excuse. Your retreat is necessary. It is your embodied intelligence showing you how to survive. Without communal ritual, without societal recognition of how to be with loss, this is your body doing what it instinctively knows to do. 

I hope you can remain in the sanctity of the womb space you create. Sleep. Eat. Pray. Release the need to justify or explain. 

There is alchemy in this darkness. 

A day will come, perhaps sooner than you believe possible, when you will hear the chirp of the of morning birds, notice the bend of your monstera always moving toward the sun, and sense the quiet of the late afternoon.

This is the more than human world calling to you -- it recognizes the season you are in, and is ready to meet you in your loss; shield your exposed heart. 

This world has always been here, but it is with your tender skin that you can truly receive it.

It shows you billowing clouds heavy with grey and ringed in white, a little boy pushing a toy lawnmower who stops to point out a sparkling silver pinwheel, a crowd of strangers bobbing their head's in unison to a new song.  So too does it deliver you to the first strawberry of the season. What a shade! What a beauty.

You will lay your body on the sun-kissed earth, stretch into a starfish position and miraculously fall asleep. When you wake, you recognize just how held you are.