In times like these our griefs rise. The big, the small, the ones in between.
With so much fear and loss in our community of humans, and so few of our usual distractions available to us, that which we’ve been keeping at bay is creeping round the corners or jumping out of our industrial strength boxes to claim our attention.
For every thing we love and lose, we grieve. Whether we feel it at the time or not, it’s there. It can hurt like hell to feel it, or it can whisper through us like an old familiar song.
It’s part of the dance and dream and the cycle of living as a feeling human being.
It’s hard to process, hard to fathom sometimes. Hard to find the inner kindness and compassion for our sorrow which can help hold us as it moves through.
Sometimes those parts of us which grew to keep us safe, keep these griefs from us. They stand between us and this powerful emotion, believing that to feel will be too much. That we’ll collapse or not be able to keep going, or drop into a pit of darkness which we won’t rise from.
And yet, some things are not meant to be be gotten over, but gone through. I believe grief is one of those things. When we allow ourselves to feel it. To surrender to the pain, the darkness, there is always a rising. A lightening somewhere deep in us.
A turning to gold in the depths of who we are.
And sometimes our grief needs to be witnessed. To have another living being receive, hold, nod and know. To acknowledge it’s ours alone and yet universal. That it is survivable.
Our society is changing. It’s no longer needful to keep our pain to ourselves and try to soldier on through. There is such a rich abundance of support and understanding in the world right now. So many offerings to help you find a way to meet and come to know your grief. So if something in you is hammering on the door, calling through the windows…. maybe now is the time to let it in, set a place for it at the table and call in the support you need.
The loss only you will ever feel.
It’s in you now.
A deepening to your eyes,
a deeper chest of sorrow to sink into when the tears, or the rage,
or the love,
come calling, passing through,
leaving you alone on the doorstep waving.
Your little large grief holding your hand like a child calling you to come in again
come away from the world.
Erica Lowe 