Farewell Spit

Farewell Spit in New Zealand
stretches like a long arm around the water.
A narrow strip of land,
a gentle curve reaching outward
as if the earth itself were saying:
something here is allowed to be protected.
Not imprisoned.
Not cut off.
Protected.
That image stayed with me.
Because there are moments
when we are asked to do the same.
Not to become harder.
Not to disappear.
Not to fight everything that touches us.
But to draw a boundary
around what within us
may no longer be flooded.
Sometimes we think love means
that we have to stay.
Keep explaining.
Keep trying.
Keep returning to the same circle
in the hope that this time
something will be different.
But not every circle is sacred
simply because it is old.
Some circles remain
only because no one ever stepped out of them.
And sometimes wholeness begins
exactly there:
with the one who says,
this is where it ends for me.
Not out of revenge.
Not to hurt anyone.
But because a pattern can only truly die
when it is no longer being fed.
Sometimes that requires silence.
Distance.
A period in which we do not step back
into the same conversations, roles, tensions
or unspoken expectations.
Not because we no longer feel.
But because we finally feel
what something is truly costing us.

Farewell Spit therefore does not feel
like a wall to me.
A wall says:
you are not allowed to be here.
A protective curve says:
this is where I care for
what is alive within me.
That is something different.
Boundaries do not have to be cold.
They can be soft.
They can even be loving.
But loving does not mean limitless.
Because when we keep remaining
in places where we have to abandon ourselves,
connection slowly becomes self-loss.
And that is not love.
Perhaps farewell is sometimes exactly this:
not removing someone from our heart,
but stepping out of a form
in which our own wholeness
can no longer breathe.
Like the sea
being held by the land
without losing its movement.
Like an arm
that does not grip,
but protects.
Like silence
that does not have to be empty,
but can become a space
in which old patterns
finally receive no echo.
And perhaps there we discover:
that farewell is not always
the end of love.
Sometimes it is simply
the end of our participation
in what no longer honors love.

Farewell.
Not from hatred.
Not from hardness.
But from clarity.
With a soft curve
around our own waters.

In reverence.
Evelien Ari’Elune