From Grief to an Exalting Release

It’s hard to grasp we’re in a process of grief before our eyes have settled on the thing that has died.

But the grief starts as soon as the message of separation has touched the skin of your soul.

Sometimes the grief is easy to carry. Like a summer jacket, slight and light, protecting us from the wind so our sweat can dry as we keep climbing the hill.

Yet at other times, the grief presses us from all directions, demanding our full attention.

The lives of so many of us are changing rapidly day by day. For others it’s a slower unfurling. I do catch myself saying ‘when are we going to go back to normal?!’ though I know that normal is just the continuous line of things as I knew them.

Seeing through the veil of this question, I can feel how I’m touched by all the souls who are asking the same. Before I’m letting go of the skin that held me together, I am gathered into our shared humanity.

And before I allow the new vertebra of life to join, I am joined by grief and new questions that don’t let go of me.

Only when you relax the resistance to sadness’ command,

only when when you let go of a familiar continuous line,

vertebra after vertebra

unraveled by new questions,

can the insights and the new dreams

grow a new skin,

to envelope your sweet body,

grooming a new, safe nest

for a heart

that has never stopped pounding

for love.