My mind needs spring-cleaning right now, just like the rest of my house. The ideas are piled up like laundry ready to be sorted and folded and put somewhere. They are mental meteors ready to land and make a big splash, promising to be the beginning of an adventure on the page, but the lights on the landing field are obscured. My brilliant gems zoom off un-tethered into the stratosphere.

I excuse this by reminding myself that I am besieged because a member of my family recently committed suicide. I’m choosing my words carefully. David Whyte says that most people feel besieged most of the time by events, by people – even by the creative possibilities they have set in motion themselves.

A traumatic event, a suicide, throws the mind into disarray by demanding a place within every thought, every activity. It’s difficult to remember our vision of what we were doing and what we wanted to do with our lives before the event. Someone has chosen to stop in the midst of life and we question how to regroup and reorganize our life without them. The people who are still in the world are waiting for us to come back from the disorganization and brittleness of grief and we’re not sure how to cross the river of broken dreams and rejoin the world.

Peter Walsh, believes that organization begins in the mind rather than our basements. Walsh became famous as an organizer of clutter on the TV series, “Clean Sweep.” He doesn’t focus on objects, he goes right to the heart of the matter. He asks his clients: “What’s your vision for the life you want?” He starts with the purported “purpose,” picking up an object and asking the homeowner if it moves them closer or farther away from their life vision. If it’s further away, out they go.

Perhaps vision is like hope, that place of deep intentionality and connection between what we feel inside and what formerly seemed outside. It is finding again the frontier of our thoughts where things seemed new. Perhaps I can find that place again where I was comfortable with my relationship with grief and living with it.

I’m in search of my place in the living conversation. And perhaps I’ll arrive if I can unpack my words again and land on the page.