Notes on Grief, a Journal. JULY
July 27, 2022
There is a purity in grief that is disconnected from story.
It is immaculate in its ability to reveal deep, deep, truth.
Truth that exists beyond the mind’s ability to perceive it.
A truth that can be felt, and sensed. But not pinned down or explained with words.
This kind of grief is the quiet after the storm.
The smooth unrippled lake.
Where the silence takes on a life of its own.
And the aloneness bequeathes a depth of connection never before experienced.
A connection written about by sage’s and bard’s of old.
That’s where I am now. Sitting at the edge of this lake. In this holy place.
Art by: Peter "Brownz" Braunschmid
TWO FREQUENCIES AND AN INVERSION -July 12, 2022
It’s really something to wake up with my face drenched through from tears, to feel the ground of my heart so utterly turned over by the plow of reality, yet still I long to live.
I’m living in a world of strange paradoxes. Opposites.
I get these little signs and hints that my beloved is still near. Which holds both gut wrenching pain, and makes my whole being smile. There isn’t a word for this emotion. But I experience it frequently.
Love longing.
Grief is a wild ride.
It decimates all illusions of safety.
Ruptures our relationship to life itself.
Steals the fantasy that we control even the most infinitesimal things.
Brings us nose to nose with human frailty.
With the fragility inherent in it all.
Breaks the spell of normality. Shatters it.
Has us feel so raw and exposed to the elements. That it’s impossible not to notice to how much life we’ve kept at bay, prior to grief coming to our door.
Grief is a great revealer. It shows us that Life is more simple, more elegant, more meaningless, more chaotic, more painful, more beautiful, and more broken, than we ever thought possible.
There are no anecdotes here.
No earned wisdom can be applied to make the suffering less acute.
The Self-help aisle is useless.
There isn’t a class or bullet-point list we can unleash to overcome our grief.
No weapons to deploy. Because it cannot be conquered.
It’s breadth and girth are all encompassing.
This is life-long, left undone, spirit work.
The Earth quakes, opens up, and swallows us.
That’s where I exist now. Cradled in that chasm.
And so I’ve done, what all philosophical grievers do, I’ve been meditating on grief & longing.
And how spacious and open handed they are.
They ask nothing from us.
We can’t grab our grief & longing, and pin it down, any more than we can direct ourselves into a happy, open hearted, juicy life. It doesn’t respond to instruction.
Longing & Grief, just are. 
No escape. Can’t be fixed.
I’ve begun to feel into the different layers of frequency that can be embodied on this plane of existence.
The paradoxical nature of the space I’m in is so exaggerated, and so primal. I feel like I’m on the charnel ground of the senses. This is a great place for an exploration. Because I’ve never been so full and so empty at the same time.
And so…
I’ve noticed in my “getting on with it attempts” how some activities are brimming magic. They are, for lack of a better word, sentient, alive, “le piment de la vie”.
The way making love is. Or being overcome by beautiful music, or smelling a baby’s head, or getting into a warm fragrant bath, or drinking fine wine and eating delicious food.
And some activities are life negating. Like “trying” to satiate desire, ignoring our hunger, chastising our humanity. Working off of a list, mindlessly running errands, distracting ourselves with social media, concerning ourselves with what others might think. Fitting ourselves into an cultural cutout.
One provides a life of wonder, Eros, and ecstatic enchantment. And the other is robotic and numb.
Or in other words, we could say there are two basic frequencies. Life giving, and Life Negating.
The grand paradox of them all is that death itself is life giving. It lends itself to that frequency.
Grief, sadness, and longing, or suffering towards some meaning, belong in the soggy hearted - cracked wide open, Eros, category.
And what have our lives been these last few, isolated, fear driven years?
An exercise in Numb, robotic, Groundhog Days? Culture has anesthetized us. Inverted our model of priorities.
Made to-do lists important, endless scrolling sexy. Safety a badge we wear with honor.
Told us our productivity determined our worth.
Asked us to choose a side “Be like everyone on this side, and you’ll be ok, because we have the truth”.
When in fact, because truth is verb, it belongs to Eros. Eros doesn’t have a side. It’s a frequency.
We’ve used all the wrong measurement tools.
It makes me recoil in horror to see how much I had previously invested in the monotonous, magic-free, inversion. Because “Responsibility and Maturity” are mandatory purchases like buying a car and a house.
I hadn’t thought about practicing paradox with those two investments.
Grief and longing lend themselves to flourishing.
I now have a magic filled nightly walks, when grief is present.
I notice the way the sunlight moves through the tree branches and hits the ground. How the wind moves the grass and enhances its color palette. I’m aware of all of the winged ones who walk beside me.
Without the grief, I walked monotonously to get my allotted steps in for the day. Zoned out.
Apply this same formula to everything. And it’s the same. It’s a template for life negating normality.
I can’t go back and change what’s happened. All I can do is try and thrive where I’m at.
But there is life here. Where death is also present.
It’s awoken something in me that was sleeping.
And it can do the same for anyone.
There is so so so much to grieve right now.
The Earth. Women’s Rights, The World we are leaving to our children, our own childhood.
Grief & longing can always be with us to inspire us, to make the ground fallow again, if we allow it.
When it starts to bubble up from the depths of soul, it’s release can be nothing short of ecstatic.
I am finding so much gratitude for the life giving nature of death. It redeems something immense from the nightmare of loss. Because somehow, magically, something significant is gained.
Photo: Tanner David in Chicago
July 7, 2022
Inside every death, inside grief from loss, there are two people. Death partners.
Us, and the person who has died.
When my son died, one of the things that impacted me right away was the bizarre role reversal.
He went from being my child, to my ancestor.
From a soul it was my responsibility to guide, to my teacher.
I have regularly sat on my practice mat beneath his altar to receive instruction.
The wisdom that has flowed through these sessions has been profound.
And if I hadn’t put into practice what I felt he was instructing me to do, I am not sure where I’d be.
It has been him who has come to me in moments of terror. When the world has seemed too unsafe to inhabit.
When he was alive, Tanner had trouble allowing love to penetrate him. Unfortunately, this is part an inherited legacy. How our family did love early on. Love hurt. So we shut down.
His instructions to me from the other side has been to open as wide as I possibly can to love. To stay in a state of reception, and he would provide enough love to keep me alive. I trusted that completely. And it has materialized.
If you have sent me love, thank you. It’s been my life blood connection, my tether, to this world.
When I’ve inevitably questioned whether or not this had to happen, if it was something I had the power to prevent, it has been him who has impressed upon me the deeper truths inherent in his departure.
In the week before he left, he gave me so many gifts. He told me what a good childhood he had. He thanked me for being his mom, and for always being there for him. He told me if I ever felt scared or unsafe or needed help, I could ask him for whatever I needed.
He didn’t die intentionally. He had meant for all of these things to happen in the physical. He was sweet like that. But I believe all of these things came up because his soul knew he was getting ready to leave. And he would be my ancestor. I fully believe he left me instructions to call on him. Another miracle.
This period, while rife with unimaginable, and at times unbearable pain. Has been peppered with magic, beauty, and so much love. I’d be missing it all if he hadn’t told me to stay open, and out of self blame.
While I ache for him everyday, long for him in a way that’s physically painful at times, a new relationship with him is starting to come into view.
——
I wrote all this as praise for my son.
The most incredible grief partner.
And as encouragement for anyone else who may suffer a loss. (Inshallah not of a child)
I won’t fluff loss up as just some transition.
It clearly isn’t “just” that for those who mourn.
Instead, perhaps as a template one can draw on from inside of our pain. Our grief partner is there, and my sense is that they very much want to be of service to us.
—-
In his eulogy I borrowed words from Martin Prachtel’s book “The Smell of Dust on Rain”,
“Grief expressed out loud, whether in or out of character, unchoreographed and honest, for someone we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them.
Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses”.
I went on to ask attendees “Instead of the regular stoicism we are so accustomed to in the West, our outdated traditions of “not openly displaying our grief”. It is my job as Tanner’s mother, to see that he is well mourned, and that adequate praise is given to him, & his life to help him on his journey to the next world.”
So this is part of fulfilling the promise I made. I am going to praise my son every chance I get. Even if it is praise for what he is doing as my ancestor. And I’m going to share it. Because what is praise of it isn’t shared?
Art by Visionary Sea
July 4, 2022
“To never leave Eden is to stay surrounded by spirit, but remain uninitiated by soul”
-Martin Shaw
Nostos, Hireath, Longing.
Is the most transformational energy on the planet.
Grief happens INSIDE of our longing. And eventually becomes longing. Both are offshoots of the verb or frequency “love”
It has us remember and reconnect with our original dreaming.
It allows us to enter the underworld willingly.
Allows us to trade growth for death.
Without the underworld, there is no story.
Without crisis, there is no story.
Without meeting our limit, there is no story.
Without being defeated, there is no story.
Do not ever try and squelch or satiate your longing.
Rather open yourself up, stretch your arms and legs inside of it.
Befriend, embrace, make love, to your longing.
There you will find your the land of your soul, and learn the true texture of your story.
July 1, 2022
“The destiny of man is to be more and more human.”
-Albert Schweitzer
Scrolling through Social Media is a distinctly new event since the loss of my Son.
I see so much warped/distorted information. It really stands out right now. Being so close to actual death.
For instance these posts about transcending our bodies. Moving into 5-D, being able to manifest instantly. Time travel, off world agendas. Light, Light, and more Light, Etc.
Sincerely my loves, I tell you, that’s what we contend with AFTER we leave the body. That is being dead. That’s not why we incarnated here.
We are going to miss the whole purpose of incarnation entirely if we don’t focus on being human and what is happening in the human realm.
We are here to relate to people, to love, to connect, to be involved in our communities, to experience duality, to fight, disagree, learn how to resolve stuff WITH other people. To sit with the weak, the frail, the suffering. To feel our own despair, and then rise again because we are loved.
We are here to be alive. Here-Now
To experience nature, our bodies, food, partnered love, family love. And so on.
To interface with the mystery without getting totally consumed by it.
Please don’t waste your time fretting about the “agenda” so much. Or having consistent worry about your “vibration”. In the end, you won’t wish you’d spent more time concerned with these things. In fact, you won’t really be concerned about your body, your “selfhood” at all.
You will be concerned about your loved ones, your legacy, and how you are remembered. Your impact on other people.
The planets, The Galaxy, & Mother Earth, are adjusting the vibration for us. The corner of the universe we are traveling through is what assists most with planetary upgrades, collective evolution, and our level of consciousness.
It isn’t just down to human centered activity.
In fact, that idea is the vary thing we need to move away from. The big screen dramas /that center us as having total control over the outcomes here. That is a distortion. It’s actually a mixture of a lot of things.
The good news is we can make a difference with our hands, our love, our care, our human, embodied actions.
We are here to effect our tribe, our little corner of the world.
And it all comes down to love. That couldn’t be more clear to me now.
Not the bypassy get walked all over kind of love.
No, it’s the Mature, human, wise, love. Love that has gone through the process of refinement so that this person can then stand as an elder, and example to their tribe.
My loves, Literally none of us leave alive.
So….
Care about what matters. Do your work. Do your best. Win and be defeated by greater and greater things. And be happy finding joy in the mundane as well as the spiritual. Simple as.
