Nature is wise. I walk amidst her splendor feeling isolated and apart, a separated "other" tangled in thought and perception, tangled in "me". Then I look out at the breathtaking brilliance that I am a part of. Flowers litter the ground, a wind blows and the trees sway in response, a bird calls and mosquitos lurch. For a moment there is no "other". The wind is breathing this breath, the ground supporting this step, life is arising in all its multiplicity and returning in singularity...a single breath, that is All. And I am home.
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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