Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,
Out of the room that lets you feel secure.
Infinity is open to your sight.
Whoever you are.
With eyes that have forgotten how to see
From viewing things already too well-known,
Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree
And put it in the heavens: tall, alone.
And you have made the world and all you see.
It ripens like the words still in your mouth.
And when at last you comprehend its truth,
Then close your eyes and gently set it free.
~Rilke
how I choose to move…
inquiry for today~ the darkness always shifts…
There are forms of grief that arrive not only because something has been lost, but because an entire world is passing away. A way we imagined our life would unfold. A relationship to ourselves. A future we had quietly organized around. An identity that once gave us shelter but can no longer accompany us where we are going.
We may think our task is to move through grief so that we can return to life. But there are times when grief is the life that has come for us.
In the old stories, the journey into the underworld was rarely undertaken voluntarily. Something happened—a rupture, a disappearance, a summons. The familiar world opened beneath the feet and the traveler was taken below, into a place where the ordinary maps were of little use.
This may be one of grief’s secret functions. It takes us somewhere our usual ways of knowing cannot follow, beneath improvement and transcendence, beneath the person we have been trying so hard to become.
If we can resist the demand to turn grief too quickly into meaning, medicine, or transformation, we may begin to sense another presence there. Something ancient accompanying us through the dark, not explaining the loss or promising that everything happens for a reason, not asking us to rise, but walking beside us as the old world dissolves and our eyes slowly adjust to a different kind of light.
Grief is not only what we feel when we lose something we love. At times, it becomes a psychopomp—the one who walks with us across the threshold when an old world can no longer continue.
~Matt Licata
