Unchosen

This November brought me a gift of relief - a day, then several days, then a week without vertigo - my first vertigo free days in nearly 18 months.

While my medical team and I have been trying several things, it's hard to pinpoint the tipping point that made the change. My mind tries to make sense of it, wants to figure it out so I can be in control. But my heart yearns to soften this need to know, to simply open to the grace that holds me.

I feel tremendous relief from the challenges of daily dizziness. And I've been surprised by how this change has also brought some wistful grief as the tides change.

Periods of intensity or pain have a way of making me very present and open - I'm riveted by life in a way I can lose sight of when things are easier or 'going my way.' As my body heals, I find myself missing this liminal space, and the gifts it brings.

Life can be so different than the way our mind imagines it will be!

Unchosen by Karly Randolph Pitman

With a line from Caroline Bird's Geography Lesson

Let me tell you gently –
the weather will eventually turn.
This season will not last forever.
And when it finally cools, and your pain ebbs,
and you walk out
through the valley's shadows,
you'll be surprised by how much you miss it,
the way the heat shaped you in the fire's forge.
You'll miss the burning, how your heart was stretched,
the wrenching wholeness as your exiles emerged,
coated in their loamy mud.
You'll miss the tenderness that only comes
with shattering, with the heat of fire –
with the season you didn't choose,
but that chose you.

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With a grateful heart, Karly