To love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper

in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air,

heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think,

How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face between your palms,

a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.

~Ellen Bass

maybe it’s never really ok to give up on ourselves….

inquiry for today~ we are here. in the deepest shift. in the heart of our life.

and the dim shadows appear

To understand the part of us that wants nothing to do with the full necessities of work, of relationship, of loss, of doing what is necessary, is to learn humility, to cultivate self-compassion and to sharpen that sense of humor essential to a merciful perspective of both a self and another.

In the wild, the best response to dangerous circumstances is often not to run but to assume a profoundly attentive identity, to pay attention to what seems to threaten and in that attention, not to assume the identity of the victim.

Through being equal to fierce circumstances we make ourselves larger than the part of us that wants to flee while not losing its protective understandings about when it might be appropriate. We decide not to run not only because there are many who would be left behind who cannot run as fast as we can, but also because in turning to the source of the fear we have the possibility of finding a different way forward, a larger good, through circumstances, rather than away from them in some supposedly safe area where threats no longer occur.

We know intuitively that most of the time, we should not run, we should stay and look for a different way forward, despite the evolutionary necessity. Rarely is it good to run, but we are wiser, more present, more mature, more understanding and more thoroughly human when we realize we can never flee from the need to run away.

~David Whyte