A few weeks ago, Bebe The Cat went missing. She doesn’t wander far or for long, so I knew she was in trouble. Some well-meaning people, told me stories about cats that wandered off for days/weeks/months and returned home none the worse for wear.

I knew she was in trouble because I know her ways. She had a few secrets, but was never out of range for more than an hour or two. If I stood by the back door and called her name, she’d often appear from a few gardens down. I knew she was in trouble and she was. On the morning of the sixth day, I found her under the barbeque. Her back, right leg was obviously broken. It turned out to be more shattered than broken, and the only course of treatment was to amputate. My tiny black panther is now one leg short.

We are all coming out the other side now. The light is back in her sea-green eyes, and my system has just about stopped trembling. Leonard The Dog doesn’t quite get it. He’s looking for the cat that jousted and danced with him, and doesn’t yet recognize our more vulnerable Queen.

Maybe, that’s why I’ve been slouching through my days with this title: Losing Things, sitting at the top of an empty page. My attitude to losing things is not what it was. I have lost a few things along the road: people, places and things, like we all do. It’s not only that. More like a deep curiosity and borderline preoccupation with loss and losing. I remember listening to Janis Joplin singing, Me and Bobby Magee: freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. That song, and particularly that line would crack my thirteen-year-old heart wide open, with something like tenderness and despair.

We lose everything, and in the end, we are gone. I find this so damn comforting, and it makes me laugh that I do. I’ve written before, about simplicity and it’s something to do with that. All that, down to the bone simplicity, just waiting for me.

I had a significant ‘losing it’ moment in my late twenties. I was living in Sydney and practicing the dark art of self-hatred, with all my might. We use that terminology, don’t we? Losing it. Losing what? I had lost a lot already, but never IT, if it meant the capacity to hold on. This night, walking through Darlinghurst as dawn broke, I did lose that. I was so broken, drug addled, psychotic, homeless, loveless, empty and humiliated, that I fell over the edge. It’s so long ago now, that I only just remember the street beneath me, the lightening sky, my bedraggled body, only just dressed for dancing. I barely remember the narcissistic boy that left me there, once the chemicals had run out and worn off. What I do remember though, is the feeling of falling. I remember crying out: it’s happening… it’s happening. I remember the fall and those words in my mouth.

Of course, I hit the ground, and continued pursuing relief or communion, or whatever it was I ached for. And, for a very long time.

This falling though, it left its trace memory in my cells.

Much more recently, I fell like that again. I was so tired of never quite being okay, and from working so hard to not be depressed. I was exhausted from trying to heal and somehow failing. Even though I can’t pin down an exact day, when there was just, nowhere left to go, I went over the edge into free fall. I lost some stuff on the way down, and funnily enough I don’t miss it.

You could say my life got smaller?  Or more spacious? That’s the thing about simple: both small and wide at the same time. I love this idea: My Little Life, not as a put down, but as an affirmation. My little life. Your little life. All burning briefly, like wave after wave of tiny lights. We burn, flicker, and we die.

So, what did I lose?

Some deep, oh, so deeply entrenched ideas about what matters and what makes me okay, or not okay. Some stories about success and failure. Some notions about who I am, or should be. Yes, in a nutshell, that is what I lost in my fall, not from Grace, but directly into Grace.

Into the Fields of Kindness, rather than onto a lonely road in Australia. And the cry from my lips and heart, this time, is something like: thank you. I have found a lot of gratitude in these fields, now that I know I don’t have to fix myself, and that even if depression is my home address, I am whole, as well as broken. That we all are.

I’ve been thinking about my mother, and how her life was an epic journey of humiliating losses, until all that was left was bitterness, self-hatred and the husk of a tiny body, attached to oxygen. She taught me well: how to find myself in the mirror of all that. Her little life feels brutally small. I had to go all the way to Australia just to keep breathing. Breathing and dying on the sunny side of the world. I didn’t know she’d died for quite some time, but strangely, it happened at the very same time I started living.

In eleven months time, I’ll turn sixty. My mother died three days after her sixtieth birthday. I wasn’t there, but felt it in the realms of mystery. Maybe a death/life baton was passed from hand to hand? From mother to daughter? It has taken a lot of my little life, to find the Kindness, Mercy and Grace, that brought me home. It has taken my fierce attachment to life, in chaotic coexistence with my appetite and longing for death. And, it has taken so much help: from strangers, friends, dance floors, poets, healers and destroyers, from cats, dogs, horses, nature, and from my teachers and their teachers, and  many, many circles of courage and love.

I am increasingly, more humbled than humiliated by losing things, and that comfort I mentioned, maybe there is a kind of freedom in nothing left to lose…and, even though that’s never going to be quite true, until the very last breaths, at least I can offer up my struggles with losing things, to what is truly precious.