02.04.2020
This dystopian rollercoaster is quite the ride. Emotional flux daily. Changes in news / advice / laws even more often than that. Strange new conditions as old familiar routine dies quietly and without fanfare. A toll on so many fronts and a gnawing uncertainty as fear keeps peeking in the window from outside. And of course the rampant rising up of our shadows, the old wounds and ignored injuries that never actually went away.
So perfectly distracted by our well polished lives and a trojan horse worth of coping mechanisms, we barely flinched when the earth burned. Still waiting for someone else to save our dying world, the revolution held at a safe distance. But a rampaging virus, an hysterical media and a world in lockdown later and here we all are. Blinking at the shock and horror of it all.
Every journey to the shadowlands is an initiation. As we take those first tenuous steps into the unseen, abandoning our old life sometimes without choice, we are engulfed by a tsunami of all the feelings that we have pushed down there. It is as though they clamour for our long lost attention. Sensing a tear in the fabric of our lives, they rush through.
The flood can easily sweep us away and set us adrift as the currents burn and sting. We realise that our grief is not a puddle, it is an iceberg. That it isn't something we can reframe, ignore or get over. Grief is grace in motion that feels like fear. Allergic to lightwashing it persistently demands to be felt, turned tenderly over and bathed in tears.
Grief has a direct relationship to your love and your loss. It honours both. A shapeshifter and at times a trickster too, grief can arrive in a howling blaze or creep in like a weeping woman. It can throb beneath anxiety and steal our breath as it coaxes us to the depths.
You can learn to waltz with grief. You can tenderly wrap everloving arms around all your many selves. Just hold them and sway to its currents. Even as you mind its steps and hear the strings rise and fall, you are adapting to life without. And sometimes without even realising, whirling yourself into a new choreography as you hum its tune.
Grief is love's souvenir
~ Glennon Doyle
Art @spectralgardens
Words c. Kerrie Basha 2020
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