I can’t cry hard enough…
It’s a great line from a song by Buddy & Julie Miller. “Now that you’re gone, I can’t cry hard enough…”
Hard enough to squeeze out all the grief, cry all the tears. Maybe it’s a good thing. It is possible I could drown with them all flooding out at once.
I am recovering from Coronavirus. Of course. Ten years with no more than a two day head cold but the letdown after after my mom’s and John’s death was just enough to open me up to this big fucking mess. This last punch in the gut after the one two of my Mom and husband’s deaths, has left me flattened. Ripped open raw grieving. Too sad to imagine I’ll ever feel like I really want to do anything ever again. Is this depression?
I meditate every morning on my long list of gratitudes. Plant myself squarely in the garden of love and hope. And forgiveness. Funny, all those ways that I wanted my husband to be “different”, didn’t just go away when he died. Nor the feelings of frustration, disappointment, anger. So now I am working on forgiveness. For both of us. For not finding our way in those areas of our short precious life together that could have made it even oh so much sweeter. For not being able to really hear each other about “those things”. For our human failings despite all our strivings. Acceptance, a balancing act requiring all ones core soul micro muscles, constantly adjusting, working hard…
I desperately want to believe that if I ever choose to connect again intimately with someone/s I will do it better. Yes, better. I will stay ever more self-connected and express my needs clearly with equanimity. That I will require the other person be able to do the same. Just to be clear, when loss happens, it opens the door for a do over. I don’t want to blow it and fall into old patterns.
Which reminds me. That’s my biggest fear right now. In the enormous longing that is building up to have our life be “normal” again, the whole world is going to run at breakneck speed right back into same old same old. And all this suffering will be for nothing. These are the conversations I want to be having, hearing, reading about. Not how much we are looking forward to having coffee at our old haunt, or hugging our friends, or going to a sporting event. But how we are going to collectively tackle hunger/food security, ending human trafficking, child pornography, health care, education, the inequalities rampant in the economic system, racism, the prison system, and on and on…
How and where do we begin to stand in solidarity for these changes to be made? Charles Eisenstein has written an amazing essay that points to all this: https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/?_page=5
This pandemic has pulled the rug for most of us. PLEASE. PLEASE. PLEASE. Do not go back to sleep. The darkness around us is deep.
A Ritual to Read to Each Other
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider —
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
