Invest in Loss
“Invest in loss.”
That was the message I received after three years of looking for my biological father.
We all know conception does not mean fatherhood. I never knew him. I didn’t even know his full name. Mystery surrounded him. Mystery and trauma. And longing. So I was using mystery to find him.
The whole thing started in the winter of 2013, on a suggestion by my Family Constellations teacher. Will you look for him, he asked. Impossible, I said. I’ll never find him. There’s looking and there’s finding, he said. You can always look. Open the door on your end.
That same week, a dream. My teacher stood at the foot of my bed and said, “you want to find your father? Look here,” and he gave me a cityscape built of macaroni and construction paper, just like the constructions my children were bringing home from preschool.
Months later, I made a new friend who also happened to be clairvoyant. Let’s try, she said. We would tune in every few months, each time a new vision and a new magical lead to pursue. By the summer of 2016 I was engaging in a full-on psychic private investigation. Guidance pointed me to Toronto, and I scheduled a visit to coincide with a weekend Family Constellations workshop by a teacher I admired.
I arrived in Toronto alive with possibility. My plan was to bring my quest to the Family Constellations workshop, plus I had my psychic friend on speed dial. To top it off, I had googled and found a dowser with experience finding lost people, and she offered to help me for free. The dowser needed some time, so we made an appointment for a follow-up call in a few days.
Everything felt so alive. I fully expected to manifest this impossibility, and I was supported by the loving hearts of so many. And then on the last day, my call with the dowser. I sat on a park bench and looked out across the shore of Lake Ontario as she told me that he’s not in Canada. That, in fact, it’s not clear he’s even alive.
I walked through the park in a daze. My heart felt collapsed with disappointment. I took refuge in a library nearby, wandered the stacks, pulled a random book off the shelf. A small one, about an American man living in Taiwan and the lessons he learned from his teacher, a Daoist Master. I read the whole thing in one sitting - why am I reading this book? Then, the words of the master: INVEST IN LOSS.
I left Toronto with a tender grief. How could so much magic and synchronicity could bring me to this dead end? I didn’t understand the strange wording of the phrase, “invest in loss,” but I understood loss and that was enough. I fully let go of the search.
It would take another two years before I would understand the “investment” part of that phrase.
2016 was a turning point for me - and for us collectively. And here we are, ten years on. What have you been dedicated to? Where do you need to invest in joy and creativity? Where do you need to invest in loss?
In 2018, 2 years after dropping my search, my mother sent me a 23andme DNA test for my birthday. I thought nothing of it, not even sure why she would get it for me. She had done her own test fairly recently, and doing my own just felt redundant.
I already know who I am, I told her.
Nevertheless, I spit in the tube and sent it in. A couple of weeks later, an email: Your results are in!
Those results turned my life and my sense of self completely upside-down.
The investment paid off. I had found him.
LOL: No, this is not my father!
Meeting my half-brother for the first time in 2018.
I was never able to contact my dad. He passed away about a month after I found him. But I found family who love me like family!
Entangled with the future?
I am sharing this story now because this was the first of three events that happened to me in 2016 - the others were just as surprising (not include the election that year, which surprised everyone).
I came to understand that this was happening because just as we can become entangled with the past, we can also become entangled with the future: that there are times when the future we are trying to create into is a future that is not meant to exist.
I believe this is happening with increasing regularity. The future cannot be predicted based on the experiences of the past.
If you would like to connect directly with your own three futures, I am leading a workshop that has become an annual event. Join me for the Three Futures Oracle.
The Three Futures Oracle
An Online Workshop
Where in your life is “letting go” the greatest investment?
