The Empty Wall

Dreaming Through Grief

It’s taken me a while, but I finally feel ready to write about something I haven’t really been able to share much about publicly. And that is that while I was writing Herbal Dream Magic, I was also experiencing one of the hardest losses of my life. 

I’ve shared a lot of the joy and discovery of the writing process during the 6-month sabbatical I took in 2025. But I haven’t shared much of the grief of that time, as I had to let go of the person and the life I had wanted. The marriage around which I had built my adult life came to an end. After years of love, hurt, joy and pain, and lots and lots of effort to keep it together, it collapsed.

I recently reread my dream journals from that time. What a roller coaster ride! Reading and reflecting on the words in those pages is truly an exercise in holding contradictions. It was a Dickensian best of times/worst of times dichotomy. On one page, I’m writing about the profound, beautiful, awe-inspiring dreams I am having.  I’m actively spending my days and nights doing plant magic and dream divination, and all the insights and truths and revelations about myself and the greater mysteries of life are unfolding, and my intuition is coming online in a way that is blowing my mind, and I’m somehow able to get myself to weave it all into beautiful words, like some kind of fairy tale maiden with an impossible task, like spinning straw into gold. Remarkably, I am living my ideal life. It is a time of tremendous creative freedom and fulfillment, and it’s all right there in my dream journal. 

Then I turn the page. 

There is the brutal pain of heartbreak and the bitter loss of broken dreams. The juxtaposition is head-spinning. At the very moment I am feeling most alive and creatively free, some of my deepest fears are coming to pass. I feel both held by a benevolent universe and completely, utterly alone—like an orphan in a haunted wood, barefoot and lantern-less, without even a moonlit breadcrumb to follow.  

One thing haunted me most during those months: why couldn’t I fix it? I wanted so badly to fix it. I tried so hard to fix it. I would have done nearly anything to make it work. I would have kept spinning that straw into gold, day after day, night after night, if only to avoid facing my fear of aloneness in that woebegotten haunted wood.

Another thing haunted me, too. It was a thought that came howling through like a banshee cry in the dead of night, shards of glass tearing through my mind and body: I had made a HUGE investment in my marriage. How could it all be for nothing? How could it all be dissolving before my eyes? How?

These painful truths filled my waking life and spilled into my dreams. The grief dreams were big and intense; they filled pages of my journals. And when I look back into earlier journals, I can see that the truth of what was coming had been arriving in dreams for years. It seems obvious to me now that precognition was trying to prepare me. Some of those dreams even predicted, with startling clarity, when,  how and why the end would come.

But I wasn’t ready to know what I knew. 

So I made symbolism out of it. I interpreted those dreams as messages that I needed to try harder. Maybe if I learned to express myself better, mastered communication, loved more fiercely, accommodated more, read the right books . . . The bargaining period was extensive and exhausting.  It’s hard to admit when you have overinvested in something that isn’t going to pan out.  

But I had made another investment, too. I had invested in my dreams, my writing, and the work that was calling me. I’m so glad I did, because that investment has become the foundation for the life and new identity I’m building now.

And my dreams were investing in me, too. All those years I was trying so hard to make everything work, my dreams were consistently showing me another way forward: that I could do it on my own, that I could soar solo, that resources were available to me in unseen places. They showed me possibilities for my life that I couldn’t yet imagine for myself. They showed me that I might be worthy of things I didn’t even know to ask for.

Seasons have come and gone, and come and gone again, and it’s still hard to reread those journals. I still hear the shrill, glass-shattering echoes of the banshee cry at night, though her calls are quieter now, and she doesn’t rattle my bones with the same fear. Because I have already let her in. Unable to outrun her, I have given over to her curses. I have dreamed through the eyes of the banshee herself. I know how to sound the howl, how to haunt the hollows, menace the crossroads, to swoop and cackle through the treetops of the godforsaken wood as the wild and wicked hag, untethered and unpunishable. And I know how to return to my soft body at dawn, open my eyes, remember the laundry and emails, and start again. Untested dreamers take note: once you have become the banshee, you no longer fear her cries.  

In the waking world, it has taken me a while to fully reclaim and reinhabit the empty space left in the wake of marriage. At first, I tried to keep it all together, and keep it all the same. I kept the same routines, as responsible as ever in the home I loved. But as the months passed and the divorce dreams did double time on the night shift, the life I had kept so carefully intact began to loosen at the edges  

I’ve always been the one to fill the corners of a home. But post-marriage, I let myself take up even more space. I stopped trying to tidy up the piles of herbs that cover the kitchen table. I let my art supplies stay on the desk. I left books and journals open in piles on the right side of the bed until their spines broke. I left as many dishes in the sink as always, but this time, I didn’t worry what it meant about me, or if my lovability would diminish. I would write at odd hours, no longer waiting for permission. No longer waiting by the windows of my heart, scanning the horizon for a sailor’s return. No longer waiting for someone to tuck me in. I discovered the comfort of a hot water bottle and let myself sprawl and rustle the covers of a well made and well warmed bed. A bed sometimes stained with blood and pen ink. So many dreams and bleeds. So many moon rises and sets. 

Slowly, I began to learn the particular rhythm of my own mess and tidying, expansion and contraction, the strange tides by which I inhabit a home when no one else is watching. I began to trust a rhythm that felt native to me. 

There is one wall that stayed empty. After we divided up the furniture, this particular wall remained blank for more than a year. Just an empty hook where the art used to hang over the antique secretary desk that I loved but that wasn’t mine to inherit.

I looked for something to replace it. Nothing felt like it belonged. I thought about learning how to build a little shelf to make a new altar, but honestly, I did not have it in me to learn one more skill while launching a book, building a business, single parenting, and generally trying to do all the things well enough to survive. I asked my neighbor with sophisticated art and design sensibilities to advise me, and then took none of her good advice. It just wasn’t time. 

Then, puttering in the garden the other day, I remembered being twelve and wanting to redecorate my bedroom. I had a seaside cottage vision in mind—shells, weathered things, faded quilts, the whole business. I have apparently always had the aesthetic sensibilities of a much older woman. Cottagecore was alive and well in me long before it was a trend with a name.

No one was available to take me shopping or help me, so I used what I had. I found paint in the basement and I painted the room myself. I found my shells and a glue gun and glued sand dollars, starfish, and conch shells near the ceiling. I made a little mobile from sea glass and feathers and hung it in my window. I flipped my bedspread over because the underside was a kind of “shabby chic” tattered quilt look. 

I still remember the look on my mom’s face when she walked in. She was surprised. It looked completely different.

And I was so proud.

I had made something beautiful with the skills, imagination, and materials I already had.

Recalling that feeling, I finally knew what I would do with this wall.

I gathered what I already had. Plants from my garden. Baskets. Herbs to dry. Symbols and objects that hold meaning for me.  Things that feed my imagination and remind me of the connection I have with the natural world, and the imaginal world. Teacups my little child self would have LOVED to drink out of. And yes, a seashell.

The empty wall has now become a living altar and a practical space at once. A place to dry herbs, dream with the plants, and remind myself of my perennial ability to renew, rebirth, rewild, and reconnect with what feels alive. It will shift and change with the seasons, like me.

This simple twine string spanning the wall and hung with precious plants and objects is a deconstructed altar to the person I still am, the life I built and rebuilt, and the person I am still becoming.

And still, I dream on.

These days my journal is still full of contradictions. There are still the grief and anxiety dreams, the warning dreams, the dreams that arrive carrying truths I would rather not know. There are the other dreams, too. The beautiful ones. The strange and luminous ones that leave me lying awake in the dark with my heart full. Dreams of plants and trees - some familiar and some I have yet to meet in person. Dreams of wild animals, wild places, impossible landscapes, old mysteries, and ideas I have not yet found words for. Dreams that send me reaching for my journal before my eyes are even open. My bed is still full of books and journals, and ink stains from all the midnight scribbles and uncapped pens.

My dreams are still investing in me.

They have already given me more than one book, and lately they have begun whispering the shapes of others. There are trails appearing now that I cannot follow yet, doors I have only glimpsed through, whole territories of dreaming I suspect I will spend years exploring.