My Dad is an enigmatic creature, one minute he is wandering about like an absent minded dingbat and in the next he is spouting off deep, soulful wisdom that rocks you to the core. You can never be truly certain which will surface, the wandering fool or the brilliant sage. They seem inextricably linked. Today, on the phone, he spoke of love. He said, "One should always rejoice over love, for all things of this world pass away and LOVE is a beautiful experience. You should give yourself freely to it. You should hold nothing back out of fear of loss or pain. Like all experiences it will pass into something else, but it is better to have lived it than, in your fear, hide from its embrace".
Gotta love that ole' guy...
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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What better use of our words than to speak of LOVE.