I haven't written anything personal for some time. It is not for want of deep diving into the well of living, rather it is from a constant water-treading in emotional exhaustion. Sometimes the weight of human expectation and belief (my own at the forefront) weighs me down with lead-like determination and I find myself afraid of the next breath...the next "not knowing", afraid that tomorrow will inevitably find itself echoing the sharp notes of today. These are the dark nights. I surface for a long deep breath, drawn unhurriedly in a clear near-autumn eve, and ask, "What if we can't f*#k it up?". What if life just is and there isn't a right way or a wrong way except our thinking makes it so. What if it...all of it...isn't such a big deal. Would the stars still turn round the heavens if I tumbled ass over teakettle into my own stupidity. Would autumn still give way to winter. Of course it would. What if I stood up, tall, and stretched from my long crouching, took a deep breath and bellowed deep from the bottom of my belly. What if I roared. Would the sky shudder. |
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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