Like Water.

Words, As Fruit #40

I have been thinking a lot about grief lately. And tenderness, and how my tenderness, in protection of itself, shows up as suspicion, distance and distrust. And I have been thinking about these words Judy (Mom/Iya) spoke during a particularly difficult night after my father’s passing. In the moments just before Judy spoke these words, I was talking, out loud, through my strained and troubled efforts to wrap my head around the mental, and emotional ache. Trying to figure out how to hold my heart in my own hands so I could, in some way, make the unconsolable, consolable. As I was sobbing into the air, begging for an answer to the question, “why does it hurt so bad?” Judy says,

“How beautiful is it? To have loved so much, to grieve so deeply.”

I still don’t know how a heart both breaks, and sees you through.

These thoughts on grief brought be back to an old piece. It’s this piece that for the last 48 hours has been nudging at me. I’m taking it to mean these words here are meant to be revisited and shared.

a lot can change in a second, a minute, an hour, a day, a month, a year...
in the dust up of transition it can be hard to see clearly.
we find ourselves holding on, sometimes just barely, stumbling through, getting stuck, hesitating, falling back.
but, if we're willing to follow the stumbles through, in the haze we can choose to let go and surrender ourselves to other senses.
it is these senses that have often brought me to my knees,
and i find myself kneeling — genuflecting, at my heart's center. 

at my heart's center i am led to gratitude, 
not only for all the good, and the easy, but for the hard too. 

as i kneel now, the transitioning dust swirling around like the snow in a snow globe, i express my gratitude for loss, for mourning, for grieving, and for breaking. 

i think of each — loss, mourning, grieving, breaking — as bodies of water,
sometimes showing up as slow streams, sometimes as oceans with waves and under currents that come sweeping without mercy or warning. 
my time within each of these bodies has, and is teaching me how to navigate. 

these waters change me. 

loss unravels me.
mourning softens me. 
grief leaves me breathless and in pieces.
and breaking anchors, and sets me free. 

ultimately it is the water that invites me, 
these bodies that require me to find my way, and my breath and steadily keep breathing. 

i have welcomed, mostly stubbornly, these bodies.
allowing them to carry me. 
i sit at the feet of their waterbeds and say, “teach me." and i am gifted new language. 

now, when asked what languages i speak, 
i say three:
the language of the heart
the language of the dark
and the language of lost ones finding their ways home.

---

Alice Walker, in her poem ‘When You See Water’ writes,

“[…] water is always itself and does not belong to any of its containers, though it creates them [...]”

Grief does not belong to us.

Grief is not us. Though it does change us.

'

Everything…in flow.