Themes on Grief, part 1

One of the ways that grief can deceive us is by making us — the griever— feel that what we are feeling, what we are subject to, is ours and ours alone.

We are pulled under.

No one has ever felt what I feel.

No one will ever understand.

No one…

But grief is both the most deeply personal experience and a mythic invitation onto an ancient pilgrimage, which has no purpose other than the holiest one of all: to sanctify the quiet moments of our lives with a narrative frame that is ever larger than we are, so that it can hold what we may not yet know we can hold.

When we speak here about myth, we are talking about all that has been, all that is, and all that will ever be. We are talking about a way of being in relationship to time and space, to the dead and the living and the unborn, in a way that emerges from us as if it has always been there, quietly ready for this moment. A seed long before our birth planted and now germinating effortlessly in words and songs and stories and images we can marvel at but can’t take credit for.

One of the biggest mistakes of contemporary psychology is to not see grief as an ever-present doorway, invisible to the eye, now made visible and thrown open to us.

Where that door will lead us, we cannot yet know.

What unique mythic stories and rituals it will awaken in us, that only walking the pilgrim’s path can reveal.

We are on our own now, and yet, we who grieve, are walking with the whole world.

If there is one ask of grief, it seems to be this one: don’t try to shut it up, don’t try to hide it, to pretend it’s not there, to overmedicate it, to project it onto others, to run. There is no way around grief, only through. And, sadly, there does not seem to be a way to live a fiercely lovingly whole life without figuring out some way that we can make peace with grief.

You may be fooled but grief will not be fooled.

Grief is an evershifting co-arising of variations of regret, sadness, anger, resentment, disappointment, gratitude, awe, tenderness, love, hope, guilt, surrender. Grief lets us know that some part of our hopes and dreams for our lives ended too soon or never happened at all, and that we will never be the same again in some vital way.

Grief will remain, rising up and returning, increasingly unbidden, if we do not turn to meet it.

Be curious about where it wants to take you, what it wants to show you, who is it beckoning you still to become.