I woke up to read these words from a dear friend who is traversing the dark canyon of a loss of a loved one: “grief is just love with nowhere else to go”.
Sometimes things just pop up in our lives in an insistent way. This past week it was grief. Many of us have lost people we love dearly, and know the outermost reaches of pain in trying to reconcile the loss within our hearts. I know that I have, in the past, relegated this word “grief” only to death in its most literal form. But recently I have come to reconsider.
Previously I wrote a post about passing through the fires of tests. I used the image of a field burnt to the ground. We’ve seen this, all of us. In the news or in person. What may have a been a beautiful and vibrant place, burnt to the ground, nothing left but charred ashes and broken remains. Death. This physical place no longer exists. There is no life to speak of.
This moment can manifest in the end of a relationship, in the loss of a job, in having to leave a beloved home, or in letting go of a dream or idea that somehow couldn’t or didn’t manifest. It may even be in a recognition that certain beliefs we have held onto all our lives are no longer true. And in any of these instances we need to give ourselves time to grieve. To grieve is to mourn the loss of something or someone of importance. It is to recognize what that thing, situation or person brought to your life that was beautiful and beneficial, that allowed you to grow and become. And it is to acknowledge that a shift has taken place that requires that circumstance or relationship to change. Perhaps entirely, perhaps to evolve. But none the less, without looking at the situation square in the eyes, we are preventing ourselves from the grace and goodness that grieving can provide. From the natural process that acknowledges and then allows, over time, for releasing.
“Don’t run away from grief, o soul, look for the remedy inside the pain, because the rose came rom the thorn and the ruby came from a stone.” – Rumi
These words from Rumi remind us that our biggest potential for growth resides within the pain, as does our healing. For whatever we are giving up, whatever we are losing, the journey and the process of losing it is creating a shift and change within us. If grief then is derived from, and in proportion to, a love that we felt, then we can celebrate, or at least acknowledge that there has been that much love. Then we can, over time perhaps, begin to re-channel that love so it has some place new to go…