I made an interesting discovery this week: love flows IN as well as out. Perhaps this is common knowledge for many of you but until very recently I didn't know love truly flowed in. I have always experienced love flowing THROUGH my heart, like an open faucet but not necessarily into it from others. I never doubted that others loved too. I just believed that all of us could only experience love on the outflow. Life is such a wonderful playground and how appropriate that my heart should evolve its capacity to feel love and let love in at the same time as doctors prepare for a surgery to repair its faulty wiring. Thank you David for the gift. Apropos indeed.
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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