Hip Turtle Glide

The name arrived in a cold river in East Tennessee, standing in water lit gold from the sun above the mountain, days after Elizabeth died. There was no planning it. There was only the moment — grief and joy in the same body — and then the name, out loud, ringing true.

I didn't know I was naming a practice. I only knew I was naming something that would come when the time was right.

The turtle carries everything it needs within its own home. It glides. It is ancient. It does not perform its wholeness — it simply is it.

That felt like the truth I was living toward.

I have been composting for fifty years.

Compost is what happens when what has died, what has been lost, what has fallen away — becomes the richest possible ground for what grows next. I did not know that was what I was doing for most of those years. I was just living — surviving, really. Staying. Choosing, over and over, to lean into what was present rather than away from it. The ache. The fear. The shame and doubt and despair.

I refused, with everything in me, to let bitterness take root in what grief had so thoroughly fertilized.

I chose, instead, to let all of it — the joy and the suffering both — nourish what feeds.

What made that possible — what held when everything else bent — is something my grandmother named when I was four years old. She told me I had a spine of steel. She planted that seed forty-six years ago and I have been tending it ever since. It has been bruised. It has been battered. It has never been broken. Everything I have built, and am building, stands on that column. Including this.

The fruit I was reaching toward — and didn't always have words for — was joy. And love. And the deep, unhurried satisfaction of a life lived at the actual level of my own soul.

I have always known what I was here to do. From as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a mother. Not as a role — as the organizing principle of my entire life.

When Elizabeth died, I found out what I was made of underneath all of that.

Nothing prepared me for what followed. Not the therapy. Not the preparation. Not the love of every person who surrounded me with everything they had. My son moved out. The life I had organized around mothering emptied from every direction. I was entirely alone in a darkness I don't have clean words for — a place where I couldn't see the ground, couldn't find which direction to face.

And in the deepest part of that dark, I found something:

There was a part of me that was not done.

If I was not done, I had to look at why I had disappeared. Not just in the grief. Before it. I had been making myself small for a long time — to keep the peace, to be palatable, to fit into spaces that weren't built for who I actually was. There were parts of me that had always been rooted. I chose to keep them in the dark.

Elizabeth's death didn't create that disappearance. It just made it impossible to keep pretending it wasn't there.

Slowly I put myself back together. Not into the shape I had been before — into something truer.

Elizabeth showed me how to fight, especially when the odds are against you. She showed me how to use your voice, even when it's broken. She told me to eat the cake, because she knew life is short.

Her absence was the fertilizer required. Her last goodbye was the breaking of the door's seal.

I know this path because I walked it in the dark, without a guide or a map, with only the warmth of those who chose to stay with me to light the way.

That is what I am here to offer.

Not theory. Not a framework. Not a map drawn from someone else's journey.

I want to turn my heart inside out so that it becomes a mirror for the way I see you.

Sitting with my own chart gave me language for a current that had run at my deepest core my entire life — but for which I had never had a framework. It provided signposts pointing to where and how to look, and illuminated parts of myself I had never known how to find. The seven-year-old full of play and fear. The seventeen-year-old still alive. The ageless depths.

The invitation to meet me through Hip Turtle Glide is one I would want to respond to myself. I know that because it is a reflection of me — roots and all. Not just the parts that live in the light, but the parts that live underground, seeking nourishment. The parts that have held through the very things that might have broken them.

I don't know what I'll meet in each reading — of the chart, or of the person, or of myself in that moment. But I am not afraid of the dark. I welcome it as a friend.

May it be a mirror to the parts of You you've never looked at directly. May it be a mirror to the parts of You still unknown. May it be a mirror to the You you've always been, You always will be, and most authentically are.

My harvest is here. Now. It is raw and tender and only almost ripe. But it's above ground. It exists — in every moment I remember to be present.

Simply because it's time.

And I am inviting You along.

There is finally something I can point to and say: that is mine.

A life I would want her to witness.

~Lisa