I apologize for the delay. There was too much traffic or something last night. It was still slow this morning. Maybe my computer is in trouble.
I thought of several things, like quests and writers and like the Ring trilogy and old loves and forests and sunshine and loss.
Grief is a strange thing. I think people fear grief as much as anything. Grief feels timeless and that means it feels like forever. At the same time it feels unreal, or like it ought to be unreal. Grief won’t go away but it sneaks into crannies, waiting for you to pass by. Then it pounces, like a cat, driving you down, and like a tiger will, it grabs you by the throat and then won’t let go until the life gasps out of you.
None of this is really the way things are but it is how grief feels. By the time you get old, all the griefs of life add up, or they can. A sad song can release a grief chain. Or if someone you love dies, then all the other deaths are remembered. Simon and Garfunkel singing The Boxer does this to me. The other day the Beatles singing Here Comes The Sun got me. That was the song at the end of our wedding ceremony. Judy Collins sang McCartney’s In My Life as our intro. I’m a little thick right now just bringing this up.
The reality of grief is of course that it is survivable. The solution is to in some sense welcome it and open wider, allow it to pass through as freely as possible instead of to resist it. It feels timeless but is not timeless.
If Hope Told Me
I went to the glade
where we found the golden ring,
where I last saw you
before the change came up,
before this new severance
came upon us here.
I would go to all
lengths I know, and seek new ones,
go there too if hope
would tell me to go,
if I could find you, lead you
back to what we had.
June 7, 2009 10:51 AM
Contraction
1 week ago
Again again again he echos...open wider. And the grief, to allow it full access. The vision in my head is of standing alone in a room...crucified stance, knowing the ghost of grief enters. Allowing the apparition to pass through me, feel it as each misty cell mingles with my living ones, co-mingled for an instant. Just passing through, but fully embraced.
ReplyDeleteYes indeed. Grief is a firing line, a prover. It reveals the snags in your soul perhaps better than anything else. If you cannot open to grief it is because you are protecting against the flow. If you open and you have a snaggy soul grief will catch on the snags and reveal them in some act or accident. Sometimes things will happen in really strange ways that are really personal but come from somewhere at you.
ReplyDeleteIf you have cleaned out enough of the snags, then grief will flow, large and warm and cause you to swell, enlarge in the pressure, but will in a strange way not actually hurt that much. There will be room for other feelings and they will happen, seemingly contradictory, but they are not.
It is possible for the experience of joy, holy awesome joy to happen in the middle of grief. I know it. It happened to me in one moment of purity.
i do not want grief.
ReplyDeletei do not welcome it.
i simply slant my forehead
and hum like a frog on a log
and hope it misses me
:)
xo
erin
Three frogs on a log...
ReplyDeleteOne decides to jump off.
How many frogs are left?
enough~
ReplyDelete