Snow, snow and more snow. Oh my! I must say that I have so little appreciation for all things cold and with winter dawning enthusiastically, I find myself dreaming of balmy nights and the swaying ebb and flow of sea on sand. Now I know how unproductive and un-present that is. I am not so far immersed in self pitying to miss my rebellion against what IS and yet when the snow falls in cascades of white, blanketing the city, I can't help but appreciate the beauty with a melancholic longing for Spring.
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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