The best way to know God is to love many things.
~~~ Vincent Van Gogh
After a severe loss,it is hard to venture any new love,let alone nourish wisely the loves that we have.we are comsumed by our loss.What do we have to give? And if we venture a new love,what is to protect us from the same thing happening again? Nothing. Yet the wisdom of the ages is that the way to find life is to pour our love out on the rest of creation. I remember as a child in the aftermath of my first evperience with death,thinking that the best way to shield myself from devastion at the other losses which were bound to occur in life was love as many people as possible.Then when one of them died, I'd still have all those others to love. I don't know that greomentry of love works that way,but it wasn'y bad for starters!
To be vulnerable is to be human at the most profound and enriching level.
Regret is an appalling waste of energy. You can't build on it. It is only for wallowing in.
~~~Katherine Mansfield
Of course there are things we regret.Thing' we wish we had done diffrently. Even where there has been time to sy all the approoriate things, iages will flash in iur minds that we'd give a lot to be able to change. Surely our loved one has forgiven us. Can we for give ourselves?
I'm sorry. Please know that I loved you. I know that you loved me.
It is the nature of grace always to fill spaces that have been empty.
~~~Goethe
Not that we cant tel the diffrence.Not that we ar being disloyal. But if life gives us something else to do with all those impulses toward the one no longerwith us, how can we not be grateful? It's inheritance~~~a blssing, even~~~from the one we have lost, going to someone else who needs what we have to give.So we are refreshed by thememory of the loved one,and at the time offering a gift,creating a new relationship.
Keep me on the lookout for someone who needs me now.
Sometimes its the last thing in the wold we feeel like doing~~~getting out and being physically active.Aside from the effort ot takes to get up and move,who cares wheather we keeep our bodies in good working order any way?
This is one of those times when thinking has to overcome feeling. We know exercise is "good for us."Its hard to continue to depressed when muscles ar working vigorously, when we are paying attention to ocvering ground or swimming through water.As we release physical energy in these rhythmic motion, part of the energy od grief rides away, too. Part of the psychic value of such activity,I suspect,is that we are witnessing our own competence,our ability to move rhythmically, to be "in charge" of our bodies. Our sence od self-confidence will spread. Maybe we won't be forever captive of grief after all. The physical invigoration of exercise invigorates our sprit as well.
Sometimes whe i am fellin down, I am my own worst enemy/ Let me be my friend.
In the mist of the deepest winter,of the darkest night,what are we to do?
Acknowledge the cold and the dark, the mystery of an unknowable black ocean that seems to stretch into infinity...and then sing!
Or, to put it another way, "It is better to light a candel than to curse the darkness."
One of the glories of human beings is their ability to venture, to see beyond the immediate scene, to raise a note of hope and risk in a somtimes foreboding world.
As some of youknow Ilost my nolan at age14 recently, I started writing a journal...
So may this New Year's Eve--- this turning into the next year, this millestone which has its aura of sadness because I enter another year without my loved one---may this New Year's Eve be for me a time for music.And if I am able---later, if not now---may I hear in my heart the voice of my loved one lifted with my voice, to praise life, to hope for life, to join others on this circling globe in an "Alleluia," for the experiences we have shared and share even now,and for the ways beyond time and death in which we are bound to one another in gratitude and love.
When we are drawn into the brotherhood or sisterhood of loss, tenderness seems to be our natural state.We are so vulnerable. Everything brushes against the raw wound of memories ~~~ a tilt of the head, a laugh, a way of walking,beads strung together on the necklace of loss.Tenderly,we turn them again and again. We cannot bear them.We cannot let them go.
Then, gradually, bit by bit,the binding thread of grief somhow transmits, reconstitutes itself as a thread of treasured memories ~~~ a tilt of the head, a laugh, a way of walking, a touch, a particular conversation as gifts from the life we shared with the one we have lost, gifts that can never be taken away.
May I honor ~~~ and trust ~~~ the process of grief and healing,knowing that,in time,a new day will come.
love the momennt,and the energy of that monent will spread beyond all boundries.
One of the most healing things it is possible to do when one is experiencing profound grief is to try to isolate occasional wonderful moments from the stream of time.
While we may wonder ~~~ How can I bear it,all those years ahead without him/her?~~~ we live our lives in moments,hours, days.The Future will have its aspects of emptiness. But if this moment is wonderful~~~this gathering of dear ones,this walk , in the woods,this exchange with a child, this bite of apple,this cup of tea~~~let's savior it.I once participated in an human realtions workshop on setting limits~~~a task at which I, like many women, am often neither wise nor skilled.The exercise was to walk around in the roomful of people, imagining you were enclosed on a transparent globe, the dismenions of which were your own choosing. It was a wonderfully freeing adventure~~~this imagined moment of being -without-connection. Perhaps in such a way we can try to cherish the good moments of our lives. Instead of thinking: Before this I was sad. After this I will be sad, we could try: For now, I will be in this moment only and relish its goodness.
Sometimes the long view is not what I need. I need this moment, without hostage to past or future, experienced for itself alone.
