#51 Faith takes many shapes

love transformed / gift of grief / changing seasons

Here in Amsterdam, sunlight is begrudgingly making its way into the weekly forecast. Little by little, almost coaxed out of the sky, a few rays appear in the afternoon on a weekday - by Friday it’s misty and rainy again, droplets fanning my face like a battery-powered spray in my pocket, exhausted from a sunny, humid Florida day. 

The Spring Equinox was just yesterday, March 21st. The day marks the official start of Spring - the day is as long as it is short - counting down the minutes, day by day, until the days become lengthier, fuller, bursting with more time and sunlight, Summer days a promise that, year after year, is fulfilled. 

I’ve been thinking about faith very often. How it rests in our ability to trust the unseen. How it holds us in silence, asking only devotion from us, if blind, then all the more solidified by our persistence. To have faith in something is to believe that it will come, just like the seasons do, that what’s being planted will bloom, if given the time, if only given the space to breathe. A living, pulsing thing, faith carries a simple promise, hold me delicately in your hands, devote yourself to me, and I will hold you through. 

I have a difficult time recalling this time of year last year; grief truncates our memories and surroundings in that way. I do remember painting in the kitchen, listening to Marjorie, group chat messages flooding my phone every day for a few weeks, pictures, videos, and voice notes carrying the memory of my cousin, whose messages we would no longer receive, whose laugh we would no longer hear, in real-time, recorded anew. I remember a friend telling me that for every loss, or every grief you face, there is always a gift, and to look for it when it was time, when I felt ready.

Maybe the gift of the loss is still underway, or maybe I have stifled its arrival with lofty expectations, maybe I am not letting it take flight in the grandiose way I hoped. I read the stories about overcoming immense loss and grief and emerging, anew, with a shiny quality, a halo of light hovering over the mourner’s head. Saintlike. I don’t feel saintlike. I feel like a human person.

Or perhaps the gift of the loss we faced had to do more with a new way of thinking of faith; how believing that after every winter, just under the bones of the trees, the roots in the mud, there are little, imperceptible, pulsating seeds. Little promises to start again, moving quietly and in minuscule steps, invisible to our eyes. The world has been turning and the seasons have been changing beyond everything we can immediately see. I don’t question the arrival of Spring. I sit and stare out the window, magnolias blooming in our neighbor’s garden. Impossible grasping, the color of faded pink, towards an endless grey. 

If I can believe that this is the way of the world, then I can believe in holding on to faith. 

How can I hold his hand when he’s not here to hold? 

I still talk to him, in intervals, probably more than I did when he was alive. In the sense that now he’s someone I ask to take care of my aunt, his mother, and his brother. I tell him to keep them close to him, to show him that he’s still there. 

In my mind’s eye I can see him sitting next to my grandfather at the airport. I ask them when the right things will come my way, when the better times will come. “Just be patient, we’re working on it” and somehow, this makes it all feel better. More solid. Faith can take the shape of this imagery, a vivid picture of his checkered shirt and my grandfather’s khaki pants, sitting by the colorful tiles spread on the airport’s floors in the capital. 

My lower lip shakes at the memory in a heated room, laying down with my arms at my sides after exercising for the past hour. My eyes welled up with a few tears. I miss you, I think, and my grandfather waves. He comes to visit whenever I lay really still, usually after a class, having stretched and contorted into different shapes for an hour. When the mind is quiet and there’s only the sound of our breathing.

Faith comes in many shapes — it is a gift, to love and to be loved. This is also faith. To know that you were loved. 

Back at home, across the world, Spring is synonymous with the months of April to June, leaving the rest of the year in a perennial Summer. The days are always exactly the same length - the sun rises by 6.30, it sets by the same hour. I remember waking up every day to go to school, met by the same metallic, unbreakable blue sky. Rainy season limited itself to an hour of torrential downpours every afternoon after lunchtime. It only became more humid, growing the lush green around us to incredible heights.

There is time to reap and to sow there, just like everywhere else. But the passage of time is marked by an altogether different thing. Every December rolls around with deeper nights, the breezes cooler, imperceptible but still somehow felt, the change in the seasons. Drier landscapes take over. And yet — I know the trees will bloom again — the Araguaney will bleed the streets with yellow petals — the mangoes will ripen and fall, fall, fall down the trunks — the cities will light up with fireworks in December — you can have faith this will happen again, with certainty, with simplicity. No artifice.

It is a gift to hold faith in your hands, to ask it to stay. I was here with you, all along, it says. I choose to trust it.