Grief can feel like we are drowning in a deep ocean. Grief does not seem to care what we are currently doing with our lives. It rises up and washes away our personal projects like so many sandcastles. Grief can be uncomfortable under the best of circumstances, but, when we fight against it, the agony of grief can be unbearable.
Grief can be the body’s way of processing great change. Grief has natural rhythms like the tides of an ocean. We cannot speed ahead to avoid the pain of a lost love, but we can live trusting that no pain is eternal. We can remember times when beauty and wisdom blossomed out of our earlier griefs.
When we honor the process of grief we are building our capacity for future joy. The energies of grief can be unbearably painful at the time, but eventually, if we can slow down and listen, we hear a deep embodied wisdom trying to find its voice within us.
Sometimes, we can be like waves that have forgotten they belong to something wider and deeper. When we live by and for ourselves we set ourselves up for tremendous pain. I, too, belong to ocean. My blood is like sea water. So are my tears. It is possible to understand grief as primordial life rising to claim its own. Life whispers to us as a friend, not enemy, when it warns in our every personal project, “This, too, belongs to me.”
Those who can build their sandcastles without forgetting we live within the pulse of deeper tides are never far from joy. Grief comes as a brief storm and then moves on. Our personal experiences are as fleeting as sandcastles but the creativity expressed through our loves is as eternal as a cosmic ocean.