Writing on Loss
love is always rising, we may get scared and lost in the dark at times but if we trust, if we know, the sun will always rise and the love will always be reveled.
On Loss
And what it means to grieve
I have been reflecting on the feelings that arise during and after a great loss, and have been looking for inspiration and motivation for healing that could be helpful to myself and others. In the process I have been reading a lot from beatthechallenge.org , a blog written by my friend TJ Baudanza who recently passed away after a long battle with cancer. In a post he wrote around Thanksgiving 4 years ago he spoke to how we interpret time and how time reflects upon our experiences:
" I think every one of you reading this blog at some point or another has noticed that as you grow older, time seemingly moves faster. The same long lasting summer months experienced as a middle school students pass by with a blink of an eye today (which is a common complaint for us New Englanders.) But how can that be? The sun rises and falls at the same pace it did twenty nine years ago right? Then why does time move faster for me now than it did then? The answer… The summer months I had as a child lasted longer because relative to my life experience they made up a much larger portion of it than they do today. Three months of memories out of five years of life experience is huge chunk of time compared to three months out of twenty nine years, or seventy years. The reason everyones globe is the same size is because relative to our memories our lives are all the same size… and that size is ONE. Twenty nine years of memories divided into twenty nine years of living is still the same one you would get when comparing a five year olds five years of memories with five years of living."
I have juggled with this idea quite a lot lately, and have come to the theory that in our society, as young adults, we are pretty much expected to deal with what is handed to us rather quickly, whether joyful or sad, and move on to make way for more experience and more growth.
For the most part we do, we continue on the path that we have laid for ourselves no matter what bumps come up along the way. And yet some of those bumps are just so much harder to navigate than others.
How many of us have gone through a tragedy, a great challenge or defeat and felt like a completely different person, yet had to return to being the coworker, the parent, the partner, the newlywed within just a day or two.
We each deal with our feelings in our own way during these times; busying ourselves with work or family life, engaging ourselves with readings to find clarity. We do all that we can to honor what’s coming up while trying to continue living in a meaningful way. And yet, days, months even years after these events we can still feel so completely out of it and we are expected to pull it together and move on, continue moving forward although our experience of life has shifted significantly.
Certainly I have no magical cure for the grief, sadness and confusion that may happen during these times. I just felt compelled to write on this, in the love and nature of our dear Teej and to be reminded were not alone in these feelings...
Over the past month something that has been helping me to get through my experience with the challenge of life and death, has been to think of the spirituality my dear friend Teej found in his last years—his views on life, energy, and love—and to find comfort in the energy that was in him, that is him. In a spiritual practice that I subscribe to, which has so many parallels to what Teej was exploring, we learn that love is never born and never dying, but always shifting form. I think this can be really hard because we are used to the physical form and experience of an individual's love. That their love is something that we can see and hear and touch is so comforting, yet now we have to find a new way to experience that love. We’re compelled to shift our perspective to still receive their love and energy, but just in a new way.
Maybe that new experience is reaching out to each other--friends and family--learning of shared experiences, or finding a way to help others who are hurting, but always remembering these loved ones will never leave us, their love has just transformed into us, and into one another...
In a class I took today with my teachers she reminded us of the nature of the sun; its rhythm of rising and falling that we have built the structure of our lives on. She touched on the qualities of light and dark and encouraged us to see that in order for us to truly know what it is to stand in the light we need to also know what it is to been in the dark. She said, “the sun will always rise, it is one of the true constants we can count on in this world. It will get dark, but the light will always follow”. In this I found another inspiration, another assurance that love is always rising, we may get scared and lost in the dark at times but if we trust, if we know, the sun will always rise and the love will always be reveled.
It is with these realizations that I thank Teej, and pay my gratitude to him for the constant recognition that love is the strongest force in this life, this world, this universe.
And no matter how our experiences may shift, the love of every person we know is within us, helping to guide us and remind us of that power.
So here’s to you beloved Teej., the wisdom and love you embodied in your time on this earth will carry on and on in all of us. It is because of you I have started writing, in hopes that I can form some words that might be helpful if not to others than at least to myself. Thank you for your inspiration.
11/18/15
