Grief

"Grief is visceral not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form."- Megan Divine

Grief is awful. I mean awful. I hate it. And I feel pressured to be over it- to be back to normal.

Grief is not my friend. And I'm not ready to say it's my teacher. But what I'm discovering is that it is as much of a chapter in my story as is any other significant milestone or experience in my life.

It is heartache and heartbreak. It is groundlessness. It is the shattering of innocence. It is despair. It is non-acceptance. It is surreal. It is an experience of aloneness I have never felt before. It is terror and panic. It is anger and disappointment. It is life with a conscious and felt absence.

"The howling at the center of grief is raw and real"...

The howling. Yes, that is what it feels like inside. I want to go into an empty field and howl and scream. To express my love in its most wild form.

Recently when I feel it the most I get on the floor. Sometimes I just lay there in stillness and try to surrender to what is and sometimes I move around in a sort of tribal dance. There is something about grief that is so primal- the masculine and feminine in their pure energies come alive in their most wild form.

"Grief is visceral not reasonable." Yes. Maybe for the first time in my life I'm actually feeling something real. It is not a feeling coming from a thought or a conditioned response but an involuntary visceral truth that shouts out from my soul and is felt throughout my whole body.

Grief is here now. I don't know how long it will be here but as I read in a book about grief by Megan Divine, the grief of loss is meant to be integrated, not overcome. To see it not as a problem to be solved but a mystery to be honored. That the task isn't to get over it but rather tend to it, be with it, allow it.

My task is to talk about it more. Because I think we need to talk about it more. For lots of reasons.

Since my dad left I haven't really brushed my hair. I'm not really sure why. My brother recently asked me (gently of course) if I was ever going to again. I sort of looked at him and smiled and said I wasn't sure. I'm not entirely clear on the smile but what I think it was about is the reckless abandon that grief permits (yes I'm aware my reckless abandon is not brushing my hair...). Grief somehow blows the lid off of convention. It's like it's SO real and true— and we experience it as such— that we aren't afraid anymore to just let ourselves be.

Good grief...