Bodhi leaves half eaten apples, and the occasional pear, all over the house. I find them beneath couch cushions, on side tables, in sock drawers, abandoned and discarded, rotting. Bodhi is all about that first bite, the conquest. A dozen clean and shiny apples arrive in the fruit basket every week, each one new and unexplored. He waits, knowing if I see him I will take the apple, cut it in half, remove the seeds and offer it to him. In these instances, he eats the entire apple, leaving nothing behind but he doesn’t ask me to cut the apples. He prefers to grapple with what is too large, too much and more than he can ingest. Bodhi approaches life like half eaten apples, nothing needs to be finished, it is about the next great thing, the next forbidden something to monopolize his interest.
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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