grief

photo by Robert Mitchell

change is loss, and loss is grief.

The Latin root for grief is heavy.

While there are certainly slivers and dollops of Lightness throughout all of this, there is also an undeniable visiting heaviness, arriving boldly, requesting the attention of our human hearts.

This heavy guest arrives with a specific request: to feel, allow, and connect.

Her weight invites us down, to slow down, to kneel down, to turn to the earth.

Changes are happening at what feels like lightening speed, sculpting tide pools of loss in their wake, and leaving puddles of human grief to collect in the spaces they've made... with hardly any time to process.

Canceling travel plans, missing birthdays and graduations, an elder isolated, a playdate cancelled, a funeral missed, a wedding delayed, a mother alone, empty schools and lunchrooms, missing the sparkle in your eyes, loosing a job, closing a community shelter, missing a dance class, missing a kiss.

This visiting heaviness arrives to invite us closer home to ourselves and all that is, to place us in the center of the pulse, dancing between the portals of birth and death.

Even the smallest change can bring up grief, and these layers of heaviness deserve the same care one would offer a loved one in the grips of sorrow: tenderness, compassion and loving kindness.

The practice of tenderhearted compassion for self, loved ones, and the whole human family, is just that, a practice. Gentleness allows us to be molded toward one another by the grief's visiting lessons, rather than cemented, in isolation, to its weight.

Grief is a part of the process of transformation, it is undeniable.

Grief is loving inside out, it is loving, surrendered. To be full of grief means that you are even more full of love.

As things continue to transform, this is a gentle invitation to make room for this heavy visitor, and allow its lessons to soften rather than clench us.

This is a gentle invitation to feel, allow, and connect. Connect with the heart, the other, the collective soul.

We are all one human family. Just as joy, imagination, and love are a part of that family, so is grief. Welcome her in, she is here to soften us and guide us home to each other.