There are lives within us that never found their season. Songs that were never sung. Paths abandoned before we could walk them. Gifts set aside in order to belong. Desires hidden away in the service of safety, loyalty, or survival.

We often imagine that these possibilities disappear with time, sinking beneath awareness and eventually dissolving into the past. Yet something in us remembers.

The old alchemists understood that what descends into the depths does not necessarily vanish. It waits there. It gathers itself in darkness. It takes on new forms. And from time to time it rises again, appearing as longing, restlessness, beauty, ache, or an unexpected sorrow whose origins we cannot quite name.

This is one reason grief can feel so mysterious. It is not always pointing backward toward what has been lost. Sometimes it is pointing toward what has been neglected, abandoned, or forgotten. Toward an inheritance we never claimed. Toward a possibility that still shimmers beneath the surface of our lives. Toward a deeper participation in the life that is asking to be lived through us.

The task is not to force the door open. It is not to decipher every feeling or extract a lesson from every ache. It may be enough simply to listen. To become curious about what is stirring beneath the surface. To follow the thread without needing to know where it leads.

For grief has its own intelligence. It moves according to rhythms older than the mind. And sometimes it remembers the way long before we do.

~Matt Licata

while I was waiting for something to happen…

inquiry for today~ may it all linger a little while for you…

express it and love it….

I had not loved enough.

I’d been busy, busy, so busy, preparing for life,

while life floated by me,

quiet and swift as a regatta.

~Lorene Cary