Whew…Thanksgiving is fast approaching and no children…no family. Thank goodness for all the kind offers of generous hearted people who have welcomed me into their holiday traditions in the day ahead. I was feeling a tad self pitying today and so I took myself up a mountain to breathe the fresh air of a clear, cool day. I had to bring my busy, babbling monkey mind along because it refused to wait in the car, but all in all it was an afternoon worth giving thanks for.
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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