The stars are not wanted now, put out every one
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood
For nothing now can come to any good — W. H. Auden
It feels a lot like fear, with that twisting in the stomach, the remembered rebuff that you would give anything to take back, except that now it’s carved in stone, memorialized for all time, at least in your head and heart (which really is the only place that counts) … the words not spoken, or the words spoken in haste and anger that burn in your brain like a poker, or words of dismissal that sound harsher and far harder in memory than they did when you, thoughtlessly, almost absentmindedly, uttered them …
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak
knits up the o-er wrought heart
and bids it break ― William Shakespeare
knits up the o-er wrought heart
and bids it break ― William Shakespeare
Hard as it is, raw and painful as it is, as private and personal as it feels, grief has to be shared. First, it has to be wept and wailed and cried out, and then spoken, or written, or shouted from the rooftops, or danced, or painted, or knitted into a warm winter sweater or a cozy afghan, or crocheted into a lacy table cloth or shawl, or turned into a lavishly blooming garden. Whatever.
Without something to absorb it and transmute it, it takes you over. It changes you in ways that you don’t want to be changed. It will alter and twist your sense of self and safety and protection against the inevitable inclement emotional weather that will toss you around, like a boat in a hurricane, then dump you onto a rocky beach, or into a deep, dark, stagnant lagoon where the sun never shines and nothing grows …. except the snakes and alligators and some stuff that looks like oddly shaped mushrooms, but could be .... spiders ???
It's ultimately the rawest, harshest, most stripped-to-the-bone human emotion that we'll experience, and like all fragile emotions, locked away, it grows tentacles and fangs and rot. Shared, it grows wings with darkly beautiful iridescent feathers, capable of carrying you, not away from grief, but into a new understanding of it.
Just not always all the way ....
Your memory feels like home to me.
So whenever my mind wanders,
It always finds its way back to you ― Ranata Suzuki
