Ash & Honey- Season Intermission: In the Ash There Is Honey

 In this intermission episode, host Alexandria sits in the in-between — between seasons, between grief and joy, between who we are and who we're still becoming. She talks about the drive to New York (five animals, one highway, one nervous system with strong opinions), meeting her new grandbabies Violet and Charlie, April fourteenth, the loss of Marcus, what it means to stay when you can't fix, and the news that their dear friend Olga — the Godmother — had a stroke. And then she turns toward the light. Because that is what this show does. Same truth. Different soil.

This is a conversation about the phoenix. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet, effortful kind. The kind that looks like driving anyway. Staying anyway. Rising — slowly, tenderly — anyway.

 Let the burn teach you. Let the honey keep you.
 Until next time — be gentle with the body that carries you. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today I want to start a little bit different. I want to tell you about a six-month-old named Violet. She has a smile that breaks open without warning, just suddenly, completely. Like she decided the world was worth it and committed. No half measures. Full faith. And then there's Charlie, just three weeks old, still learning that he has a body at all. I watched him work so hard to focus. His eyes searching, struggling toward the light, toward the faith, towards something. The dawning awareness of the world happening right in front of me. These are my grandchildren. In the same room, in the same hand, in the same heart. That is where we're going to begin today. Welcome to Ash and Honey, where ancient wisdom meets modern healing. I'm your host, Alexandria, and this is the place between the seasons, the intermission, the breath. We just closed season two, Ayurveda, the doshas. And in our last episode, together we talked about Agni, the sacred digestive fire of the ancient Indian tradition, the flame that transforms, the force that takes the raw and makes it nourish. We talked about what happens when that fire goes out, when arma accumulates, when things go undigested, when the body and the spirit both start to carry what was never meant to be kept. I told you at the end of that episode, season three is coming, and I told you its name, Stone to Skin. Where we go to the bones of the land, my blood comes from, Northeast England, Southeast Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. We're going as far back as the record will take us. But before we go there, before we cross that threshold into the Neolithic and the Pictish and the Celtic and the Medieval, I need to stop here in this in-between space and tell you about the drive to New York. Here is something you should know about me. I know I've talked about it before, but I don't always lead with it. I have PTSD from an accident, and travel, particularly long drives, is still one of the places where my nervous system has opinions, strong opinions. A lot of loudly expressed opinions. We drove, Dennis and I, North Carolina to New York, and we did not do it alone. We did it with Orvis, Seamus, Cato, Sammy, and our cat bones. Five animals, one car, hours of highway. My nervous system doing what my nervous system does, which is to locate every possible threat in a 70 mile per hour environment and catalog it helpfully. And here's the thing about that. The thing I've been sitting with since we pulled back into the driveway is that we did it anyway. Not bravely, not gracefully, not without Denny looking over at me at some point with a particular kind of patience that only a person who loves you without condition can manage. But we did it. Because that is what you do when the grandbabies are going to be in New York and your daughters are there. You load up the animals, you white knuckle whatever needs to be white knuckled, and you go. About the imperfect, uncomfortable, sometimes clumsy thing, and having it count anyway. The ancient healers we've studied, the Greek physicians, the Ayurvedic masters, the people we are about to meet in season three, not one of them promised ease. They promised wisdom. They promised that if you paid attention, if you worked with the body rather than against it, if you learned to read the signs, you could move through, not around, through. I'm moving through five animals and all. Ashley and Mackenzie, my girls. And the new babies, Violet, just six months old, and Charlie three weeks. We were all together in New York. And we got to meet Mike, Charlie's father, for the first time. And it was beautiful, genuinely quietly beautiful. Violet smiling at everything, Charlie struggling to see this great big world. The peace that comes from sitting in a room full of people you love, doing nothing more than being present with them. But April 14th was coming, and we all knew it. Marcus, Ashley, and Andy's son, their boy. He is the kind of loss that doesn't soften with time. It just shifts shape. Some days a dull weight that they have to carry, and other days a sudden sharp pain. And anniversaries have their own cruelty. They arrive on schedule, indifferent to what else is happening, indifferent to the fact that there is a new baby, indifferent to the fact that the room is full of love. Ashley, Andy, and Adriana, they wanted to honor Marcus, and we all wanted to help them. Nothing went right. I am not going to dress that up. Nothing came together the way they had hoped. And none of us, not myself, not Dennis, not Kinsey, none of us who loved them knew how to be what they needed in those hours. We didn't have the words, we didn't have the ritual. We had only our fumbling, helpless love, and the terrible awareness that we had also lost Marcus and that our grief was real and it was completely different from theirs. Ash and Andy lost a child. Adriana lost a brother. Ashley, Andy, and Adriana took their time, and then when they came back, we watched a video Ashley had made of Marcus. Some brought a smile and others brought tears, some when he was healthy, and some when he was really sick. In Kinsey, she had a video of when Adriana and Marcus were little and playing in the park with them. And I had a little compilation of the same thing when they were young, but at different stages and images with their parents. So we we had that moment to quietly reflect. I know it wasn't what Ashley, Andy, and Adriana had hoped. Since his death, they've let go Chinese lanterns on the anniversary. It was illegal in New York, so things had to change. And it wasn't the memory or the honor that they had made a ritual. And I've been thinking about that a lot since we got home. Something that comes up in every healing tradition we've explored on this show, even if the language is different every time. In Ayurveda, which we just spent the whole season with, there is a concept called sattvic presence, the quality of being clear, balanced, luminous. And what the text tells us is that savic presence is not the absence of difficulty. It is the quality of attention you bring to the difficulty. It is being there fully without agenda, without fixing, and letting that be enough. I did not know that word on April 14th. My hands were full of helplessness, but in the Ayurvedic understanding, helplessness offered with an open heart is not a failure of presence. It is presence. It is the hardest version of presence. We did not fix April 14th. We stayed inside it. I think one of the things we talk about least in wellness spaces, in healing traditions, in the kind of conversation this podcast tends to have is how to be present for someone else's grief when you cannot fix it. We are very good at talking about our own healing journeys. We are less practiced at sitting with someone in the middle of theirs, doing nothing useful, offering nothing that helps, and staying anyway. Because staying is the thing. Even when you are doing it wrong, even when your presence feels more like an intrusion than a comfort, even when you say the thing that lands flat, or you go quiet when someone needs sound, or you feel the silence when they need it empty. We did not know how to help, Ashley and or Adriana on April 14th. We stayed. And I've been thinking about that ever since as well. About whether staying is enough, whether love that cannot fix anything is still love that counts, about what it means to bear witness to someone's grief without being able to carry any of it for them. There is a word in the old English manuscripts we'll be spending time with in season three. The Lak Nunga, a tenth century collection of healing charms and remedies, is full of it. The idea of being with. The healer's role wasn't only to dispense, it was to be present, to speak the charm beside the body, to hold the space while the body did what the body knows how to do. Now I can't say that we were there to do the Lakunga. We didn't understand how to handle our presence on the anniversary, and many of our words came out wrong. Most of our actions, I'm sure, did not come out as completely present as we were. We just didn't know how to be there to share the presence. And I don't have a clean answer. I only know that I would do it again. I would load all five animals into that car, manage my nervous system for 12 hours on the highway, and fumble through April 14th again. Because the alternative, leaving them to hold it alone again, is unbearable. For the last two years, since his death, Ashley, Andy, and Adriana have stood this ground alone. Our families all live so far apart from each other. So to have that moment, even as imperfect as it was, was a precious opportunity. And sometimes that is all healing is not fixing, not knowing. Just I'm here and I'm getting it wrong. But I'm not leaving. We had a week together, and it was beautiful, but we all had to return home. I was still carrying Violet's smile and Charlie's searching eyes, and the look of my baby Kenzie, so tired, a new mom, first time, and Ash's grief, and my own inadequacy, all of it at once. The way you do when you have been somewhere that mattered, you go back in the car, same five animals, same highway, same nervous system, and all of it travels with you. But it's different. You are taking something home with you, something that your soul needed. And then I got a message. My dear friend Wendy reached out and asked me, when was the last time I had touched space with the godmother? We call her that because in many ways she is that to all of us. So I reached out to Olga, the godmother, only to find out that she had had a stroke. She is healing. That is the first thing I want to say. Olga is healing. She is strong in ways that do not surprise me at all because that is who she is. But it is frightening. A stroke is frightening. The sudden, arbitrary way the body can shift on you. The way someone you love can be altered in a moment. And the painful realization that you let your connectiveness slowly drift away because you were focused on your life. You forgot to be present with the very people that have helped you through so much to get to where you are, to be able to focus on your life, and you let it go. That fear does not go away just because the prognosis is hopeful. It's a reminder to hang on to the people that really matter, to always make a point to be present. There is a specific frequency to being alive that the curated world ignores. It is found in the collision of a New York skyline and the hollowed-out exhaustion of a mother holding a new life, a tiredness so deep it becomes physical weight in the room, untouchable and unhelpable. It is the week where the calendar turns a sharp edge, marking the anniversary of heavy loss. Marcus's name doesn't arrive as a memory for Ashley, Andy, and Adriana. The memory arrives as a cold draft, a lingering scent that refuses to dissipate even as new life breathes in the next room. In the same seven days, a friend's fragility presents itself like the thin glass in a storm. The beauty and the terror don't take turns. They occupy the same square inch of reality. This is the unvarnished version of life, where joy and loss and fear and wonder all exist at the same time. Disease, not merely as the presence of illness, but as a disruption of the integration between the body, mind, and spirit. And what I have come to understand, trying to hold all of it at this once, is that the opposite of yati is not the absence of hard things. It is the capacity to remain integrated while the hard things move through you. I'm working on them. We all are. Violet's smile is real. Charlie's struggle toward focus. That gorgeous, exhausting effort of becoming is real. The love in that room in New York is real. Olga's resilience is real. And April fourteenth is real too. And Andy and Ashley and Adriana's grief is real. And my helplessness in the face of it is real. And the five animals in a car and a nervous system that has its own ideas about highways. That is real too. All of it is real at the same time. The ancient healing traditions we explore on this show, the Greek physicians, the Ayurvedic masters, and the ancestors we are about to meet in season three. They did not promise a world without suffering, not one of them. What they offered instead was a framework for moving through it, a way of understanding that the body holds grief and joy in the same tissues, that the mind carries loss and wonder in the same breath, that healing is not the absolute. Of pain, but the capacity to remain whole inside it. Charlie taught me something. That tiny, barely arrived person struggling to bring the world into focus. He showed me what it looks like to be at the very beginning, to be working so hard just to see, to be effortful and tender and completely committed to the task of being here. That is the Phoenix friends, not the dramatic blazing resurrection, the quiet, effortful praising, the eyes that slowly learn to focus, the smile that breaks open without warning, the friend who heals, the daughter and her family who keeps showing up to April 14th and honoring the one they lost, even when nothing goes right. The woman who loads the animals in the car and drives anyway. The Phoenix is all of us doing the work of staying present in a world that is cruel and beautiful in equal measure. In the ash there is honey. There is always honey you just have to stay long enough to find it. Before I close, I want to give you something to carry with you this week. I want you to practice what I am calling savoring, not gratitude. Gratitude can feel like an obligation, like you have to perform thankfulness for the good things in order to earn the right to feel the hard ones. Not that. Savoring, which is different. Savoring is when you let yourself be fully inside the beautiful moment while you are in it. Not photographing, not narrating, not thinking about how you will describe it later. Just in it. The weight of a baby on your chest, the smell of coffee before anyone else wakes up, the sound of a friend's voice on the phone. The very specific chaos of five animals finally settling to sleep in a hotel while you eat cold takeout. The ancient healers, the ones we've spent two seasons with, and the ones we're about to meet, none of them drew a line between healing the body and tending to the spirit's capacity for joy. So this week, find one moment, one small, ordinary, beautiful thing, and stay in it longer than you think you're allowed to. Let yourself receive it fully. Let the honey keep you. Ash and Honey will be back soon with season three, Stone to Skin, where we go to the very beginning, the bones of the land, the people who were here before the history books. We are going to stand at Neolithic burial mounds in Northeast England and ask, what did these people know about healing? We are going to sit with the Picts and the Celts and the Romans who built a wall through my ancestral homeland and medieval monks who wrote the charms that kept the survivors alive. We are going home and we are going as far back as the record will take us. With this episode. Thank you for knowing when to hold me upright and when to let me figure out how to stand strong on my own. To Olga, keep healing, Godmother, we need you. To Wendy, thank you for telling me that is its own kind of love. To Orvis, Seamus, Cato, Sammy, and Bones, you were mostly very good. Bones, you know what you did. And to you, listener, wherever you carry something right now, whatever you are in the middle of, same truth, different soil, we are all rising. Let the burn teach you and let the honey keep you. Until next time, my friends, take care.