Facing Change

I recently took a long weekend for a Western Slope road trip, re-visiting all my favorite places from when I lived in Montrose a few years ago. One of my stops was the Dennis Weaver Memorial Park in Ridgway. There is a beautiful park with a prayer stone center and a soaring eagle statue in the middle. The prayer stones are meant to be stacked, usually in three, with a prayer or a wish tied to the stack. I had visited this park a number of times when I lived nearby and made prayer stone stacks for a number of different reasons: To pray for a peaceful heart amidst the transition of moving to a new town; to pray for strength as I faced many challenging patient situations as a hospice social worker; or to wish for meeting new people and making new friends in my community. Two stacks were created that were also very special to me. In July of 2014, I had to put my elderly dogs Chester and Stanley down, within one week of each other, due to health issues that couldn't be resolved. I didn't want to spread their ashes on the Western Slope, as I knew I wouldn't be living there long term and would want to spread their ashes where I could go and visit. I had decided instead to build a prayer stone stack for each of them, so I would have a place to go when I wanted to remember them, and spread their ashes at a later date when I felt more settled.

I built two prayer stone stacks, and put them side by side on a rock toward the back of the park. Occasionally, before I moved back to Denver, I would drive to the park and meditate on Chester and Stanley's prayer stones. On this past road trip, I revisited at the park the rock on which I had placed their stones, and found that the stones were not there. Instead, they had fallen over and were scattered around the large stone that had once held the stacks. My initial feeling was annoyance…why weren't these stones exactly where had I placed them two years ago? I also felt the strong urge to stack them back, once again in Chester and Stanley's memories, and put them back "where they belong."

And then I thought again. The stones were exactly where they needed to be. This was a part of life-these stones were placed in a certain way before, and then something happened and they are no longer placed where I had initially intended them. They were now where the universe had landed them. Maybe a chipmunk knocked them over; maybe a snow storm or melting snow forced them off the rock. Whatever happened that made these stones no longer in the shape I had intended was the new intention for those stones.

So, I left them where they were because that is where they needed to be. I thought about the journey these stones will take next. Might they get further embedded into the ground, becoming a part of the ever expansive layers of the earth? Maybe someone else will pick them up to create their own prayer stone stacks? Much like life, these stones experienced inevitable change. And in observing where these stones were upon my visit, versus where I had intended them to be, I embraced that change is inevitable in my life and the lives of other as well. 

Where in your life have you experienced change or shifting? What feelings come up for you around that change? Have you been frustrated as I had been seeing these stones in a different formation, or did you embrace the change? Where in your life can you let go a little? For me, I needed to let go of wanting to "fix it", or put it back to "where it was before". This experience was a metaphor for how I have moved through my grief at times, understandably: Wanting my husband back, wanting my life back the "way it was before". But these stones symbolized for me that I am in a place of stepping in to what is now. What is happening now? What does life look like now? In what ways, large or small, can you embrace accepting change, accepting where you are now, in light of your past and considering your future, as you move through times of transition, loss and change?