On Grief, Resurgence, and Life/Death/Life
Over the past 5 months, I have been on a journey through studies in clinical pastoral education, or chaplaincy education, as a response to inner and outer calls to learn how to serve, steward, and nourish the terrains of grief and loss.
This path has taken me on a rich encountering of life/death/life within and without, one that I continue to walk humbly. At times softly and with gentle heart, and at other times with shoulders raised tight, defenses and resistance on high, and tools eagerly presenting themselves as ways to anesthetize that which can feel too much to bear.
Bedside moments at hospice care facilities with the sentient and less sentient are teaching me about presence, about what it is to have compassion with the non-fixable. These experiences, too, bring me to question and challenge assumptions and goals of fixing in the first place. Watching dementia overtake the minds of beloved souls who have nurtured and helped me along my journey is teaching me about love and legacy. A newfound awakeness to the suffering of loved ones close, those relationally distant, our human ancestors, and the historic and present losses in the lives of animals and natural world is…well, enormous.
In the company of intense rage or fear, I am learning the ways in which I contract in the face of other people’s pain, and in the face of my own. I am waking up to the places within myself and others that ignore and numb loss in unconscious fear and staving-off of the charge-to-fix and collapse-defeat that can ensue. These experiences have me wondering what it is to cultivate a vastness within and without that can hold even the deepest grief, however it presents. The horses teach me much about this.
This journey has taken me into spontaneous ritual moments in the fields with clients, deep into the subterraneous domains of my own history and psychic life. It has brought me to rediscover Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With The Wolves, and the wisdoms and knowing in spiritual lineages of the deep, wise feminine.
In the midst of winter, the journey continues. I walk on in curiosity with the lessons and teachings being lived into in this time, as well as the ways they will serve what’s emergent at the heart of the spheres in which I live, work, and play.
Below, sharing some writings that emerged at different moments of the journey.
May they serve you, too.
'Violeta Para' Reflections
Grief, my dear, has been knocking at our door for a while.
When death comes, she comes. She comes with the force of roaring tidal waves. A rabid mother who can blow through any blockage.
She comes too with gentleness. Snowflakes resting lightly on sun-warmed tree trunks, melting. Warm lakeside breeze caressing my hair.
Those long fingered icicles, frozen for a seemingly interminable time outside my porch window, snap and fall to the ground.
When the tears begin to flow, they flow. At times it can seem as if they won’t stop.
Any man-made dams in the river eventually give way to the mightiness of the flow.
Nature subsumes all in the end.
.
She has graced me many times as I have woken, like clockwork, in the pre-dawn hours of the morning.
She comes in seasons, and no cycle is complete without her.
She asks - and then demands - we answer her call.
There is no hiding from her mystery, for she is the life giving one.
The encircling, womb-like darkness we all come from, and the water we all go back to when we die.
.
When I feel her call, I humbly learn to listen. You can try to stop a flow but it will flood, eventually, destruction in its wake.
What I learn we can do, each our own humble, creative ways, is to learn to sit vigil.
And when the time is ripe, to gently mold the banks.
To heed her call, to shape the earth-clay we can, and to open.
To allow the water to move in life giving directions.
To honor destruction as a part of the whole.
.
I can trust she will be here, offering at first subtle and then echoing reminders when the flow stops moving.
.
.
.
More and more, I feel the health of our human family is contingent on our individual and collective capacities to learn to grieve.
To grieve the many small deaths, to die the big ones.
To learn to sit in the dark. And to allow ourselves to be borne again.
.
trust & faith
It’s simple, she says. right here. Just let go.
It’s not though! I cannot endure. the cries grow louder. Sooner or later it’s all she can hear.
.
when suspended on the many-bridges of these lifetimes, we encounter these sacred spaces and their accompanying psychic unearthings.
oh, but the noise is so great. and the Fear. there is something beneath the feet, yet to the nervous system-psyche, much is falling.
in the space, seconds are hours and hours are lifetimes.
.
breath tight and frontal cortex out the window, it’s too easy to forget who and what our points really are. our soul points, not so much the mentally conjured, often culturally oppressed ones.
and yet somehow, despite the myriad ways in which the inner chorus points otherwise, we continue on, we learn to endure. we know.
Amidst the mist laden chorus of doubts, we come to embody living faith. in each step, each push, each reach, and especially each yield.
.
blessed are the narrow, mist laden paths that appear, and in the hard moments the somehow-knowing of that which is around the bend. faith.
for growing spaciousness to be, to feel, and to yield into the here, no matter how tight, no matter the falling. trust.
for the hands and hearts of blood and soul family that hold our hands and witness our tears. for these steps over here, and for those later on.
oh, and we cannot forget our sentries. big, generous tree trunks that hold our weight. loyal canines resting and tracking all the while.
soft furry newborn beings reminding us of wonder. And horses, big magical horse bodies helping us to traverse these paths with a grace we could never know alone.
.
oh, these mysteries of being here, humble, human
.
Tiny hands
tiny hands reach and close, mouths form shapes to emit sounds that make words. words, in some moments, try with effort to hold that which is beyond form.
to allow the silence to hold all the is-ness, the is-ness and the okayness of all the is-ness.
of what is being said, and all alive and vast in what is not.
my human heart and hands reach and push and strive to make shapes, yet shapes fall like between fingers like sand.
in the striving, mind works harder to hold that which is already held.
.
imagine, if if trees coiled and tightened their bodies at each gust of wind, trying to figure out how to contour their bodies to make peace.
imagine if they tried to wrestle the wind to make oneness and solidarity, as if it was absent.
as far as i know, wise tree bodies experience contact. with the wind, with my hand, with the bird droppings and squirrel homes that settle into their bark and joint junctures.
there is no willing, no trying to make something something. all can be, all layers can exist, all layers do exist. sometimes they lose a limb, sometimes they die.
.
what is it to name, differentiate, to discern as we each journey towards our centers.
each mandala different, so beautiful, so exquisitely unique.
in our making of contact new delineations are created.
.
push and pull, grasp and release.
take in and spit out.
.
intimacy and delight, belonging and togetherness - and too, gray space, confusion, the sound of a metal bowl falling onto the ground and clamoring off key.
rage, anger, loneliness.
despair, grief.
.
mind strives to find coherence as it integrates seemingly competing complexities. the pressure of figuring out that which is not figure-outable.
body, quiet, still.
body knows, holds.
body loves.
.
i learn to practice the pause.
to trust in her silence and her wisdom.
to trust in a reality in which relational containers can hold.
knowing that they, too, are born, create possibilities, and die.
.
what a delight it is, to meet
eye to eye, body to body
and seek to connect
over that which feels present and alive
.
amidst confusion
amidst clamor of a metal bowl
amidst words sometimes slipping like sand between fingers
.
turning to be met,
and learning to play the scales
of sacred turning
simply
to listen
.
to listen
in service of
warm embrace
as we hold what
simply
is.
