Someone recently asked me why I blog. It started me thinking. My knee-jerk reaction was that it affords me the opportunity to reflect on a piece of my life and share that reflection with those I love...but knee jerk reactions are seldom the whole picture. My next answer rumbled up from the well of suffering (and it's bedfellow, self pity), I blog because it is public and once you have had all your journals and private ramblings stolen in a custody battle and used against you in court, it is difficult to write again, particularly with any expectation of privacy...so I made my ramblings public. But, that certainly isn't the whole picture either. I suppose I blog for any number of simplistic and convoluted reasons, most of them leading to a simple truth: recording the day-to-day incidentals of a life seems more important to me than all the many things that often overshadow them. These precious moments, captured in word or picture, are the threads of a life, my life. A simple vignette, an inhale and an exhale, breathing in and out, and sometimes, maybe rarely, that means something to someone else, but it always means something to me.
Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the
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