Too easily, even now, thirty-five years later I weep in memory of my children who left me. But then too I laugh with tears of joyful gratitude their brief lives gave me. The ebb and flow between thanksgiving and sorrow define our becoming fully conscious and can only be known to us in the uniqueness of our lives through surrender.
186,282 miles per second, the speed of light measures a common rule in our communal life. And it measures the vast spread between Ideal & Real.
Trauma & Grief are a violent, often instant, shift in how we define ourselves as safe or threatened. My emotional landscape, what I lovingly, and humorously call the cyclorama of perception and perspective, was torn asunder as if the sun had gone dark; water turned to stone the air become tar.
Degrees of perception/perspective change as they must. This is the only measure of real life: being fully alive.
"Blessed are they who mourn for they will be comforted."
I live and write from experience, not theory, and would, if I could, give you who suffer the violent collisions, convulsions, vicissitudes of the inevitable my humble peace now. I have found the end of my grief. . . . "God grant me the serenity to accept that which I cannot change” has evolved to 'God thank your for giving me the serenity. . . " coupled with an absence of fear in each and every precious moment of the infinite now. i ask that you forgive my trespass, pouring salty tears of either joy or sorrow into your shred heart. i can only say, in closing, that to me your heart is a sacred place, a cathedral domed by the starry, starry night and the glory of dawn.
"To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude." --Henri Nouwen
. . . "Spiritual", Think: whole, wholeness, holiness forged from the hammers blows. Do no harm to anyone or anything especially yourself. And in the end we will be no longer an ego. Becoming I am not this body, face, life . . . this pain and suffering is not about me, or you, but us. Though devastated now, the garden of our heart will be renewed in time.
“This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.” --Buddha
“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will (suffice) be enough.” --Meister Eckhart
