What is Lost is Not Gone
The tender ebbing of autumn is everywhere I look in the mountains. The trees shaking loose their gold leaf. The last apples falling from branches, the ceramic blue of the sky echoing behind it all, empty as a holy vessel.
And then there’s the other losses, terrible and life-changing, that we’ve experienced this last month in the mountains. Entire rivers rerouted, mountainsides cleft, life as we knew it transformed in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
This autumn I’ve found myself saying the words “lost” and “gone” often.
I check in with a friend about a place we used to love and confirm, “yes, that’s gone.”
Or I speak to someone organizing aid and acknowledge, “they lost everything.”
I’ve been saying them so much my daughter, two years old, has started to become sensitive to the words themselves, so we’ve had to start using other ones…
But today, as my eyes stray to the window behind my desk, and I see the autumn light illuminating the whole world in deep citrine, I remember a cardinal truth of this time—
That which is lost is not gone.
It still right here, living in wholeness, in entirety, in the untouched light of the Otherworld.
Autumn is the season of the Otherworld. The time when the veil between spirit and incarnate grows thin. A moment when it’s easier for the ancestors to speak to us. For the invisible world to draw closer, and for what seemed lost forever to be found once more.
It’s a beautiful, painful, holy, kind of synchronization to have lost so much during this time when the Otherworld draws near…
To lose in the season of remembering just how powerful the motion of loss is…
To lose in a time when loss itself, the falling away of what we know, is the very thing that opens the portal to the Otherworld.
And yet, it’s also a comfort. Because when the Otherworld comes close, we can be reminded of the knowing that keeps us going when loss is so strongly braided into the experience of being alive…
That which is lost is never gone.
It has simply slipped into the Otherworld— and from there it can still be felt, accessed, and experienced.
From there, it can be reborn.
On our good days, we can grasp this about our loved ones—the possibility that they still exist in spirit, in intactness, on the other side of the veil. But we often need reminding that the same is true for anything that has been loved and lost…
Dreams, relationships, landscapes, ecosystems, eras of life, ways of being…
They are never gone, not truly. They’ve just stepped from this world into the other one, and exist there in wholeness, in waiting.
My dear friend Ranpreet reminded me of this in a Somatic Experiencing session he lovingly held for me in the aftermath of the hurricane. As I talked about the grief of having lost my apothecary, and everything it meant to me, so suddenly, he gently reflected, “but it’s not actually gone, is it? It’s just in the Otherworld.”
And once he said it, I knew he was right. I could feel it, like the warm whisper of sun moving through the leaves.
Seeing my apothecary for the first time was a shock. When I kicked down the mud-laden door and stood among the wreckage, the only thing I could liken it to was the times I’ve been with the body of a loved one after they had passed. The physical vessel was still there, but the soul had flown.
The thought haunted me for weeks, until I anchored myself again in this basic tenant of the Otherworld:
That which is lost, is never gone. It’s simply been transformed.
And in this season of the Otherworld we can bring it close, like an angel guiding us towards the new era of our life.
I’ve long talked about the way that loss leads us deeper into the Otherworld…
How, the more loss we experience on this planet, the bigger the door becomes to the Otherworld— this space where the wisdom of the ancestors live, where the blueprint of our Earth’s potential resides, where past and future intertwine into the medicine of what is needed now.
And so, as we hold the hardship of loss, we also hold the arrival of that which steadies us. That which we thought was lost, come back to help us find the way forward.
A beloved team member tells me that she visits the apothecary for healing in the Akashic records…
The owner of my local grocery finds a postcard from when I first started my business, stashed away inside a cupboard…
In my dreams, I step into the apothecary and it’s still as sunlit and intact as ever.
As we say goodbye, we greet the deepening wisdom of the Otherworld, inviting this well of invisible knowing to help us as we walk through this next passage as a planet.
To remind us, as we face the endings in our life, that nothing is ever gone. Everything is on its way to becoming…
So is the healing of this planet.
And so is your life.
