Great Grief

Grief is the great equalizer, the antidote to war and violence because it is surrender, breaking open. Grief is caving in, letting go of control, of holding on to what is no longer workable and viable—the scraps of life that puncture and abrade, ripe now for grief's soft acid to dissolve.

 

There’s no fight in grief. It is the inner clean-up after battling to make things right. It is the essential balm for betrayal, and for sadness itself. Unbidden, and from its heart of non-doing, compassion emanates from grief . . . for those who never got to know themselves, who never cracked open to reveal the mess of the heart shrouding their true self—that jewel we must forever keep irrigating and polishing.

 

Our world is starving for grief, yet doesn’t know it, so starves for its lack. For grief is the hidden feast, the unexpected banquet that delivers precisely when we enact its paradox: the desert which eventually, when we have unearthed so much, finds sweet water.

 

We have such trouble with invisible churnings, especially downward—attrition for a different kind of power, emptiness with no promise for abundance.  In a world gone mad for things, no-thing feels like death. Yet, it often marks the beginning, the possibility of actually living, and together.

 

Grief is not positive but gloriously negative, the quintessential work of the sacred feminine that men, especially, deny. And for all who have hardened to their trauma and slopped on so many layers of shrouding, that crying should never be questioned—those tears the only moistening to undo decades of caked-on mud . . . for those who never softened, never let go, to fall apart back together again.

 

And here I lie tonight, empty with loss, consumed by the weight of a world that can’t grieve, my family lost on themselves, and I who can’t cope with this sick world—the aggregate momentum of generations that never tended enough to their pain.