Three hikes in three days!!! Ahhhh! Vacations provide a wonderful excuse to hit the trails. Today, as I was hiking green mountain, a westerly wind was blowing great gusts across the dry grassy hills, laying yellow stalks low to the ground in a rhythmic dance across a golden horizon. I opened my mouth wide to swallow great gulps of air. I imagined the wind traveling across oceans and savannahs, over desserts and mountain tops. I imagined it caressing the whole earth before finding its way into my eager lungs by the mouthful, to be exhaled and continue on its ceaseless journey. I smiled then. Arms stretched wide, laughing at the arrogance of the human mind to imagine itself separate from the whole of life.
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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