On grief

I’ve been sitting with a lot of grief lately, how about you?

I had been tracking a mama mourning dove whom had built a nest in the prettiest crab apple tree that was just beginning to bloom with the most gorgeous pink blossoms. It is right by my window.

Every day when i left the house to feed the horses, my door would scrape on the branches of the crab apple tree and i would look up at the mama and sing ‘good morning mourning dove’ and i would look a it from my window throughout the day and every time i left my house. She was so still, sitting and incubating the egg, she was always there. And we became friends.

Last week, for the first time i saw her little baby. She was flying the nest and the baby would sit there with wide alert eyes, and when the mama came back they would play or learn or do whatever

mama birds do to teach the baby bird to become independent.

And then one day, a kid climbed the tree.

Mama flew, baby flew and sit there the empty nest and my broken heart. No coincident it was a Mourning dove.

It felt so sudden and I didn’t realize just how attached I’ve become to the little world playing out outside my window.

Maybe it mirrored my life in many ways- the suddenness of uprooting and loss and gone with the wind, blossoms no longer pink but normal green leaves replacing the view where once the nest was built in beauty it is now just ordinary.

And i felt angry. First I was angry at the child for climbing the tree. Then I was angry at myself for not telling the child not to climb the tree. Then I was angry at myself for caring about the bird and the nest and that they flew away. I was angry that I sang to it and spoke to it and became attached.

Then I was reminded of the quote by c.s. Lewis “ I sat with my anger long enough until she told me she was grief” and realized that it was more than the nest and the process and the empty nest in a once blossoming now boring tree.

It was about my grief.

And the intensity of feeling how suddenly they felt they had to leave the nest and never come back. And how it all is my life constellating outside my window.

It also reminded me how life itself nature itself is in contact with change at all times and my human experience feels grief in that. Maybe things don’t get lost entirely. Maybe they just change.

And I find change hard despite the incredible amount of it constantly present in my life. So maybe some part of me secretly likes it.

And I definitely can’t get away from what my soul wants me to see.

So the process of grief and change and motion that was shown to me by the mourning dove gave me the gift of more contact with my heart.

My friend Rachel from intuitively wild asked me to come in and speak about grief in one of her beautiful ritual offerings in her tea house in upstate ny. And when I was thinking about what i want to share and exploring it in my meditations, I realized that although my mind jumped to death and significant loss, to some extent grief has been a constant companion in my life not through that, but through my constant spiraling in deaths and rebirths of my identity.

And I realized how my life itself is a dance between grief and love. I am so constantly grieving the previous version of myself so that i can love the new one. I am so constantly reinventing myself internally externally that the lifetimes I have lived within this one is filled with the dance of grief and love. essentially, each day each second I am losing something - if only the second before. And this eternal grief in a way is learning to live in the neutrality in the now in the present and not lamenting the past moment the past version but learning to look at that lily with so much love and gratitude and compassion and kindness and honor her for the choices she made then that brought me to this moment.

I’m a sucker for a reminder

There’s a quote that I absolutely love love that is attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus . It goes something like this

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

and that’s what the dance is to me.

everything is constantly changing. The river is never the same water, and the person stepping into it is also different each time changed by time, by experience, by mood. By life.

Right now I’m in a void on the precipice of more significant life changes. and i am moving through the process of surrender, acceptance and returning to the present moment, because oh boy my mind just lovesss to try and figure it all out and control my circumstances. And the empty nest by my window is putting me in contact with the grief that comes with that, and also holding the vision of mama and her baby flying free and enjoying their life adventures. Love and loss. Dancing.

Anyway, dancing has definitely been helping me come back into my body and into the present moment and i am grateful for it so much.

How are you dancing?