Regarding Grief

Grief comes upon us in many guises and we often wonder what it was about the little nuance that caused us to weep with a sadness best left undefined. It can ride in on the wings of a random hummingbird to touch our cheek as a kiss blown from across the room or it might crash over us as a Banzai Pipeline wave, one we’d have much rather ridden the long board on or even watched from afar.

It would be best if we could embrace and accept it as our own but it just isn’t always ours to enwrap. Our empathy for another, one stung by the sharp barbs of loss, locks us into their hearts and we feel as they do but we can only wrap them in our arms and hold tight while they are wracked by nameless pain. It is theirs to claim, they are ours to love through it.

When it is our own though, do we push it away, run from it into some escape hatch, or deny it all together? Make it our own I say, let it rush through us to cleanse and bring new joy at some forgotten memory of our lost one. Hold the best of them to ourselves to inform and shape a future without them at our side. After a while the rivers of feeling will run clean and pure like the rivulet from the base of Bridalveil Fall.

Writer’s note: the Ahwahneechee Native Peoples called the fall Pohono which means “Spirit of the Puffing Wind”. I ran across this today while looking into the fall and after I’d already used the simile, ‘as a kiss blown from across the room’. The Ahwahneechee called the falls Pohono because the fall is often blown sideways and during a lite flow of the creek may not reach the ground directly below the origins of the fall.

I note it because I think grief can often be like this - blown here and there by winds of time and emotion only to find rest in places we can’t predict.

Peace friends.