I spent the last day of the year walking through a pine forest and a field, a clearing at Daniel’s Peace Memorial Park. It’s a lovely place, imbued with love and pain and magic. When I say that I felt held by a place, I mean just that — I felt held. I felt seen, I felt safe.

The park opened in 2016 and was created to honor Daniel Weidle, who died from an overdose after struggling with opioid addiction. A friend of mine told me about this place a while back, and I had made a note to visit and then promptly forgotten. Then recently, another friend posted some gorgeous, haunting images from her visit there. I remember thinking, I have to see this place and now is the time. And so on the last day of the year, craving some sort of crossing-through experience, I did.

Before I left, I was reading a Poets & Writers piece that reminded us to “flow like water” and be open to new experiences. To remain curious and teachable as writers and artists. In the black hole of a week between Christmas and New Year’s, I found myself in super-den mode, not wanting to leave the house and my creature comforts. But I also felt that, despite not wanting to, I needed to — and I wanted something to mark this threshold of a new year, something physical to traverse, a portal to walk through.

The article, by Miciah Bay Gault, cited a quote from Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook that stuck with me:

“The poet … must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject … If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers — has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.”

Gault follows that thought, writing, “The most gloriously teachable writers aren’t simply learning how to write but learning how to see.” And so it goes that living — a lot like writing, I think — is about learning to see.

The day was cold, in the low 30s, and the sky had made its classic turn to Ohio winter: white-grey, not a cloud to be seen, flat and opaque. I drove the 30 minutes to Germantown, leaving the city and taking the backroads, passing field after muddy field. I drove past grain elevators and tractors and tarp-covered hay bales. I did my best to look around, to take in the landscape that I’d otherwise deign unremarkable, to notice.

My reading fresh in my mind, I wanted to stay open. I wanted to see. And there was so much beauty there — the bare blackened branches against the sky, an intrepid hawk flying overhead. Two men building a new bait and tackle shop near another park, known for its waterways. Life and work. People, animals, plants moving forward, somehow, even in their winter cycles. Connecting forward and backward in time.

When I came to the park’s chapel, I entered holy space. That is the best way I can describe it. It was sacred — a room full of grief, love, hope, and loss that poured out of the many souls who had passed through. It was simple and beautiful, a tiny, unassuming building among grassy fields, made of wood and glass, stained glass on the back wall. When I took my first step inside, I was overwhelmed. I stood there in the center of the room, taking it in. Everywhere I looked, there were written messages hanging from every nail. The shelves were lined with collections of sentimental ephemera — photos of loved ones lost, painted memory rocks, feathers, keychains, lucky pennies.

I felt a lowering, a letting go, and once I realized I was holding my breath, I exhaled and began sobbing. I let my head drop and the tears came, and they didn’t stop. It was the perfect place for my grief, the perfect place to cry without looking over my shoulder to see who noticed, to see who I would need to explain myself to, the perfect place to let the walls down and fall apart.

After that full-body cry, I realized something: I had been dissociating for most of December. It was so easy to get lost in the business of the holidays, which I sincerely love. I like finding and wrapping gifts for others, trimming the tree, indulging in holiday traditions like The Nutcracker, watching Christmas movies and drinking hot cocoa with mounds of whipped cream. But at the same time, uncomfortable undercurrents were pressing up beneath me.

I started EMDR therapy1 at the beginning of December, and in connecting the dots, dissociation is a coping mechanism that can come up during treatment. This isn’t abnormal, and while I’m no mental health expert, it makes logical sense that when you’re unpacking memories attached to self-beliefs that you’ve held for many years, it’s like opening a Pandora’s Box of sorts that leads to other spillage. Images and associations I never considered were coming up, leading to other memories. It sounds strange, but I can almost feel my brain rewiring itself, and while I know this is worthy work, it is exhausting, too.

Right now, a thought I’m focusing on in EMDR is “I am alone.” I don’t want to linger too long here, at the existential thread that runs through so much of our subconscious, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge how, to some degree, loneliness is part of the human condition. It impacts everyone — those with closely-knit support systems and those who lack those systems. (And, full disclaimer: a self-belief may be accurate in the sense that it is felt, but is not always accurate in reality. In this case, I feel it’s important to note that I have a great support system of family and friends who I’m connected with.)

I’m an artist and writer, so a lot of my creative practice around this work requires that I actively seek ways to be alone: to think, to read, to experience other art, to make. It is all part of the same cycle, involving varying levels of aloneness in order to do that kind of work.

Once in graduate school, we did a memory map exercise. I remember drawing a river on several sheets of computer paper, marking different points with “X” to stand in for memorable experiences in my life. The initial process of EMDR is a lot like that — starting with a governing thought or belief, and then mapping out moments connected to the belief. It is here, in this practice, that memories I wouldn’t normally call up begin bubbling to the surface — it’s like something has been opened, has started fermenting, and the memories begin flowing. Even when I’m going about my daily tasks, a memory will pop up, and I’ll realize it’s an “I am alone” moment. I see how that belief echoes throughout my lived experience, how it ricochets through the halls of memory.

The other week, reflecting on an earlier therapy session, I remembered how alone I felt when A. died. I felt like my own history disappeared, the corroborating evidence evaporating along with the cutting loss of someone I love deeply. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but my anger after A.’s death was directly related to that loneliness. It wasn’t just the anger of “that isn’t fair,” though there was plenty of that. It was the deep anger of realizing, “I am more alone than I’ve ever been.” It was personal.

In her book “The Future of Nostalgia,” Svetlana Boym writes:

“Nostalgia (from nostos — return home, and algia — longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy … A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images — of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.”

Or we engage with it and make art.

Nostalgia at its worst can be paralytic. But at its best, it can become a catalyst for new beginnings, a present moment charged by longing for the past, reaching for something new in a way that honors all that came before. It can be continuity, evolution. It becomes its own portal, a threshold. A place to step through. Something holy.