I am saying good-bye to a summer that I was barely present for. This summer was almost entirely lost to me in a dizzying spin of overnight hospital shifts and hours-long commutes across half the state as I patch together a new life for myself since I left full-time hospice chaplaincy work a year ago. I had originally wanted to find a new balance to my life but instead have bound myself to a new kind of unsustainable grind that can only result in more burnout. I don’t know where to go next only that I don’t want to go back.

I keep wondering about my vocation, where I belong, what is mine to give. I hear many beautiful and gifted practitioners identifying with the titles of “Death Worker” and “Death Doulas” with a kind of clarity and confidence I long for. The gifts they bring are much needed and perfectly attuned to help hospice these painful, uncertain times. But the truth is, it is in contrast to their clarity that I have realized I am not, in my heart, a “Death Worker,” despite having spent nearly the last 20 years of my life in the realm of death and loss. I have stayed that long, in part, because the conversations and spaces I tend to be most comfortable moving in are natural traveling companions to grief and I have loved being with patients and colleagues attending to some of the deepest questions and yearnings we can possibly carry with us in this life. There is no other work that feels as home to me in this way. And as a chaplain, my own spiritual life has continued to find nurturing in the close-up encounters with awe and mystery of this work even as my own personal faith has been, in doing so, de-constructed dozens of times. But something is calling me away from “Death Work” or at least to find a counterbalance to it, to make space for more Life Work as much as Death. What or how exactly, I don’t know.

I do know that I needed to see Mt. Whitney and the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest for the first time in my life this summer. I needed to be with the old-old places and the old-old beings that are older than anything else in the world. Even for a few days, I needed to spend time with them. These old-old ones that live on despite making their home in challenging and vast terrains with troubled histories. These old-one ones who have seen everything and are still here.

And when my best friend took me to see ostriches for the first time a few weeks ago, I could not stop looking at their feet, their amazingly ancient dinosaur feet! Seeing these old-old ostrich feet for the first time, I felt the same wonder with which my partner and I first beheld one of the highest points on this continent or an Ancient Bristlecone Pine. If a baby ostrich can be born with ancient feet, then how old are any of our eyes, our feet? How is our present form a reflection of the old-old ones who came before us? Which parts of us are already the old-old ones yet we do not know them?

So this is my reminder of the little bit of this summer that felt like summer to me, the few days tucked inside the many that held up neon arrows in the direction I am trying to follow, and the death-defying wisdom that lives on in mysteriously old-old and knotty forms and challenges me to find my work there.