Tag: Grief

Our Joined Sorrows

Niagara’s old sycamores
sycamore bark

LANGUAGE OF LIGHT
Next to the garden beds I wait
while summer’s profusion wanes

the sycamores stand in unity rows
guarding a path for the recently dead

arboreal complexion of limbs and trunk
sentient camouflage in pale olive and tan

trees older than first-born stars
leaves shimmering in the language of light.

Diana Hayes, Language of Light, 2023

I’ve started my preparation for another autumn long walk in Italy. This time, a small women’s group walking a small portion of the ancient Via Francigena from San Miniato, Tuscany to Rome. No doubt obvious to you who follow me here and on social media, I am smitten with Italy, and am borrowing a page from a once friend who said there was something about returning repeatedly to the same place, to venture deeper in.

I feel good going into this summer’s training. Last year’s foot injury has healed. So, too, my heart – mostly – from Annie’s year-ago passing. Following the same program developed by my friend, I’m starting a month earlier and so feel an ease and confidence I didn’t last summer. Every other day, alternating with pickleball, and a rest day, my chiropractor approves.

Today it rained. I opted for a slow start hoping for the forecasted three-hour break in the showers. Eventually I decided to dress for the weather and set out with my new floral knee-length rain poncho. I “ruck,” meaning when I walk, I carry at least ten pounds of weight in my pack, use my poles and wear my hiking boots, and made of today an experiment in waterproofing and breathability. Better to test here than thousands of miles and another continent away.

Last year, my friend accompanied me on many walks. This year, plagued by her own chronic foot injury, I’ll be walking alone most days. And I’m quite OK with that, given my proven way, even in groups, of often walking solo, in silence, with my camera ever ready. And so it was, Tuesday and today (Thursday), I resumed my lapsed practice of listening to podcasts. Several On Being with Krista Tippett episodes, the last one featuring a conversation with poet, essayist, teacher, and community gardener Ross Gay on The Insistence of Joy. His closing words struck deep:

Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine —
what’s that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.
I’m saying: What if that is joy?

Step by step, mulling his concluding words, that powerful question, as light showers grew heavier, I switched over to another of my favourite podcasts, Ellipsis Thinking, created and hosted by my dear friend, Greg Dowler-Coltman. In this episode a conversation with Saltspring Island poet Diana Hayes, the author of today’s chosen poem. Greg had gifted me with Diana’s chapbook, Language of Light, an exquisite collection borne of her near inconsolable grief for her mother’s too-soon death from breast cancer, the same cancer she suffered at the same time. As I listened, struck again by Greg’s talent for deep listening and thoughtful questions emerging from his innate and kind curiosity, I felt a kindredness with Diana’s way of being in the world and as a poet.

Bittersweet is what comes to mind. Knowing oneself and another when we are vulnerable in disclosing and joining our sorrows. The poignant, piercing joy that can result when we do.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

The Rocking Pendulum

Maybe a short post.
More from a promise kept to me. To write.
Though of late, I feel wrung out of words and too full of others’.

I need to empty.
To make space.
To listen to what might want to be, needs to be heard.

Maybe it’s the belated onset of “Blue Monday,” but I’ve had little energy for much beyond the thrice weekly pool visits for deep water aquafitness and an occasional walk. Despite a ridiculous run of beyond glorious weather, confusing birds and buds and deeply concerning to all of us regarding forest fires and cumulative droughts, I’ve been in a slump, the likes of which I haven’t felt for almost two decades. Then, upon the advice of my GP, I made a card to myself called “Trust,” addressed to me, “to be opened in the dark days to remember”…that the light will and does always return.

I notice that now, again, every day, especially at dinner time, how dark is giving way to sunset. I notice beautiful sunrises as I dress for the pool.

As I read the words I wrote in spring of 2005, there in black and white is the recurrent theme of generational loss and its genetic vestiges that have weighed me down. This time amplified by my mother’s recent health crisis, harrowing for all of us.

Maybe “slump” is too hard a word. “Fallow” comes to mind, as in how I felt and named myself during those first months of covid when I had suddenly lost my career, never to be found in the same way again. Underground and uncertain. Bereft and lost. Yes, there’s that. Again. Still. As it must be. Walking this week, I met a neighbor I hadn’t seen for months. When she asked about Annie, and I said she’d died in June, it became a very tearful walk. A stop on the quiet fairway, held by a tree until my sadness subsided.

I especially love the phrase gifted to me by a dear friend in the card she made and sent to me last week: “The rocking pendulum of January…” a bit lullaby, a bit raucous…

Given that here is where I’ve named my fresh territory of living – an eldering landscape – I’ll defer to the words of John O’Donohue who speaks with a wise and knowing eloquence about the interior state of threshold:

“At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it?
A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms, and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up. At this threshold, a great complexity of emotion comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual.
It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds: to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross.”

To Bless the Space Between Us

So, with little energy to spare, I’m taking my time…feeling as I can, the bigness, muchness, fullness of it all, attempting to listen inward with as much attention as I can summon.

Enough words.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Holy Grief, Holy Gratitude, Holy Love

Yesterday I woke early with my husband. Our patterns are different. He, the perennial night owl, typically rises later, giving me my cherished quiet hours, giving me delight in tending to Annie who is always eager for her breakfast, always entering the day in a great flourish. I love that about her, about him.

Yesterday the sun shone bright in the early morning sky, giving glisten to the fresh skiff of snow. The sky, that signature Alberta blue, void of cloud, full of invisible stars and moon now new holding quiet hope for its next waxing.

Read the story posted by a local nurse in one of our hospitals describing the toll on her and her colleagues working in these rigorous, strict, uncertain conditions. Describing grief, hers, theirs, their patients. A story no longer anonymous on the page or screen. It comes home, here and now.

Listen to “my” radio station (the one I helped raise from the ashes of mismanagement years ago) and note how each of the  programmers carefully selects tunes to support the artists whose concerts and tours have been dashed, and to entertain and inspire us. I send a quick email to the morning programmer. His signature joy-filled voice and appreciative nature, always appreciated, are now an especially welcome start to my day. A quick station change to hear our national station has committed to several hours of daily programming exclusively featuring our Canadian artists. Each doing what they can to acknowledge, to support, to say thank you.

Drive along that well driven work route, usually busy with fellow commuters, now quiet, with only a city bus turning the corner on its well driven route, a city snow plough dusting off that night fall. Stopped at the lights, I mouth a “thank you” across the lane to the fellow driving the sidewalk sweeper.

Suddenly tears come fast, blurring my vision. I pull over to give myself over to it. The remarkable, poignant realization – again – that every one of us living on this precious planet is going through all of this together, alone together. The odd beauty in this odd symmetry of circumstance. The enormity of it all, simply gave way in the face of noticing on another blessedly brilliant blue sky sunny cold day.  It pierced my already full heart and my tears came.

 

Perspectives with Panache, 2020

In these days of “compassionate retreat,” we wax and wane with the spectrum of emotions. We learn to welcome grief in all her variations – sorrow, fear, anxiety, doubt, cynicism, impatience, irritability, despair, numbness, denial – and know it’s all true.

We hold our hearts overflowing with compassion, wonder, healing and grace, and know it’s all true.

We notice moment by moment the small and large kindnesses of others, the gestures of care and concern, the abilities to stay connected, the beauty of another day, the laughter in a joke shared, the sacred sacrifices of every blessed person in every essential services across every community that keep us going. We know it’s all true.

And we know,
This is Holy Grief.
This is Holy Gratitude.
This is Holy Love.

May it be so.

Perspectives with Panache, 2020