Grief

 

 

A heavier grief washed over me last week, the fourth since the shelter-in-place order.   While this grief feels similar to other kinds, it also has its own unique qualities with peculiar shades of emotions and offbeat rhythms.  Like other grief, there is the out-of-body feeling of going through the motions in daily tasks as if from a few feet distance, the swings in emotions from anger to tears to numbness, the strange way in which life goes on. 

Unlike any other grief, this grief is shared with millions of others all of us now on shaky ground and some no longer with any ground left to stand on.  There is so much loss everywhere at once our collective hearts are breaking.  Through our individual grief, we have become suddenly more intimately connected with others in the shared experience of grief even in our profound isolation and aloneness.  

Grief has its own presence as it accompanies us through our days.  Unanswerable questions pull at a tiring the mind. What more will we have to face?  How will we get through this?  What will remain and what never the same?  How will I be changed?  How will the world be changed?

The experience of time has changed the way it does when caring for a new baby.  Days roll into nights into days again no longer in 24 straight forward segments but a forever rolling wave of jet lag.  Weekends around the house or the neighborhood – the new confinement – takes away its freshness.  Even those days when I have taken off for the mountains are accompanied by the heaviness of grief that no mountain view can relinquish.

I long for Ireland’s wild western coast as if that spacious wild beauty could mend this broken heartedness.  The way it did two summers ago when I drank in John O’Donahue’s blessings among his land, his family, the hidden holy wells of the ancient arctic Burren.  I think of that walk along the cliffs of Moher crossing paths with sheep and distant castles and graced unexpectedly with a knowing of what I will take with me into death and what I will leave behind.

Now I find refuge in food cooked by hand with lots of olive oil and salt, the sunset through the kitchen window, livestream yoga with familiar teachers and friends.  Yoga a path I have been following for some time now a faithful and steady companion offers refuge, freedom, aliveness.  Through asana my body is opened up to a fresh flow of energy (prana) which pushes out resistance, depression, darkness.  Tapping into the feelings underneath emotions with piercing awareness and intelligence, I stay freer from negativity.  Bitterness has no handholds and fear does not linger as the skin, flesh, muscles, organs, and bones are infused with vigor and new meaning.  We are closed in now into smaller geographies but our lives can still be expansive through inner penetration, exploration, transformation, and faith.  Like walking on those holy cliffs, yoga bringing forth what buoys us in heartbreak.