Dear Quarter Lives

Dear quarter lives, 

For some, there is no doubt in the world they are lovable. For some, their worth is clear to them. They are full of it, in the best possible way. Yet for many, what love itself is, is unclear. And so for those many, like myself, that are unsure of how lovable they are, I dedicate my words to you. To those fellow humans that are not quite sure of what it feels like to receive love, I am familiar with your doubts. I recently turned thirty and I am a little embarrassed to say that I am still unsure of the very thing on which all life is built — Love. That is not to say I wasn’t shown love, it is just to say my doubt in myself and my worth was always greater than any love I was shown, so I was never really open to receive this love that was being poured my way.

Doubt is an interesting creature; one that plants its seeds inside of us when we are very young, so long as it can find any little crack inside of us from which to root itself. To grow, this doubt feeds on the love we receive from others, which is why we are never nourished by those around us. But doubt doesn’t just grow without some help from us. It might be difficult for us to admit, but we can often be the ones supplying doubt with all the power it has, and that means we sometimes do things that harm ourselves. Though we would like to think that we are always acting in our own best interest, the uncomfortable truth is that often we are not. We are often more keen to validate our core beliefs (about us and the world) than to act in our own best interest. And so, we too, play a big role in starving ourselves of love. This helps reinforce and prove our core belief that we are not that lovable, that other people are more lovable, that they have better bodies, better families, better stories, that they are simply better and we, well we are just us — bad, broken, and unlovable. As dramatic and ridiculous as all this may sound, as true as it, unfortunately, is. It is true because that is what we believe. It is what we have told ourselves, therefore it is true, for us. 

For me, the first step to getting back on my own side was admitting to myself that, unfortunately, this is what I believed about myself. But the goal here isn’t to inflict any blame on self, but rather, to give voice to the belief. The thing is we can’t really fully inhabit our bodies and live as us without giving voice to all the silly, ridiculous and even dramatic parts of us. It is okay to wallow sometimes in our own misery, so long as wallowing isn’t our predominant state. And after admitting the uncomfortable truth we believed about ourselves, it is important to take responsibility for it and that means acknowledging that it was our choice to take on this belief and it was us who, whether consciously or unconsciously, kept reinforcing it to ourselves. And in taking this responsibility, we are ultimately acknowledging our role in this conflict against ourselves. We are saying that yes if I  can cause myself pain, I too, can soothe and heal my wounds. Claiming responsibility is one of the most empowering things we can do for ourselves. When you claim your actions, then and only then, can you change them. 

In order for us to not repeat the same pattern of self-punishment, blame and condemnation, it is important to constantly remind ourselves, during this process of re-loving ourselves, that the way we acted towards us was the best way we could act. It was the best we could do based on the knowledge and level of awareness we had at the time. And now that we know better, we can act differently. But back then, we didn’t know better, and so we must learn to forgive ourselves. It is the compassion we show ourselves that later allows us to forgive others, but as it is with everything on this journey, we must always begin with ourselves. And I actually think forgiving ourselves might be the hardest, because to forgive ourselves fully we need to accept all our mistakes and all our failures up to this point. And it might be slightly easier to accept a failure towards oneself, but when we fail someone we love, it is much harder to let ourself off the hook for someone else’s pain, for pain we inflicted on someone very dear to us. And yes it might’ve been because we were in pain, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean that the pain we caused another doesn’t count or that it counts less or that we don’t need to take responsibility for it. We must always try to the best of our ability to own up to any pain our actions might have caused another, even if it wasn’t intentional, we must apologise.

Finally, the last and hardest of all the steps is this one— grieving ourself. And that means grieving all the versions of us that never had a chance, grieving living all this time thinking we are not worthy of love. It is very sad. And it is okay for it to be sad. In fact, that is all the sadness wants from you, to be okay with it. Now, all you need to do is be with the sadness, and when you are with it, you will begin to love it, to appreciate what it has shown you, and you will at last stop trying to force it to be happiness. And so we need to allow our hearts to soften as we offer sadness a way through us and out of us. Otherwise, sadness sinks deeper and deeper within and gets stuck and then we get stuck. And so unless we make space in our lives consciously to meet our grief, the repressed grief will manifest itself in our lives in other ways; other ways that are much less desirable and that threaten to inflict further pain on ourselves and others. And so whether sooner or later, we must meet our sadness. Our sadness about ourselves, about how we expected our lives to turn out, about how they turned out much differently, about how we turned out much differently than we thought we would, about how we thought we would be all-together by now, that our lives would somewhat make sense, that we could make sense of our place in this life. And so you see, we must grieve our thoughts, our beliefs, our expectations. For there is no other way to settle into ourselves and our lives without doing so. It is the way to accept. And acceptance is the path to love. It is the path to a love that is free of conditions of time or change. To love no matter what. To love just because we can. It is not an easy journey. But you see, it’s not about it being easy, I don’t know what it is about. I know though it is about something different for everyone. I know too that all the journeys, all the paths, all the roads, do lead to Rome. And Rome, the City of Love, will open her arms wide to greet us when we finally arrive. And you will hear the whole sky cheer for you, you will hear yourself cheer for you, and finally, wholeheartedly, you will scream all by yourself and all to yourself — I LOVE YOU! 

May we all find our Rome. Later or sooner, it doesn’t matter, so long as we do. 

With love and always for peace, 

S.A. 

Dear quarter lives,

I would like to share with you some of my recent musings on the relationship between our body and our soul. And for this I would like to use the analogy of the relationship between a hanger and the clothes it holds on its shoulders.

A hanger is an entity on its own. Independent, it can be beautiful. But independent, it alone cannot serve the purpose it was created for. Yet when combined with garments, the hanger has purpose. You see I think our soul is not very different from a hanger. Our soul too is an entity on its own. Independent, it can be beautiful. Yet when combined with a body, it is able to fulfill a potential it otherwise cannot do alone. It has a different function, one that does not just serve itself but serves the body it wears, as well as all that interacts with that body. I find it fascinating that the only way for a soul to experience dependence is through being a body.

For a limited time only, soul has the special honour of experiencing a merging, a blending, a union with another. And not only does soul experience that union with the body it wears, but it is that very union with the body it has committed to for a lifetime that allows it to unite and merge with other bodies and souls too. And this ability to combine itself with another is at its most magical when a baby is created from all these unions. A baby that is not just a stand-alone entity but one made from the parts of each of those bodies and each of those souls, who too, were created from a union prior. And all of this would not have been possible without soul experiencing itself as a body, without soul experiencing itself as limited, without soul experiencing time as limited, all of which add to soul’s depth of experience.

And so to go back to the analogy of the hanger. As much as clothes need hangers, hangers too need clothes. Clothes give hangers meaning. And so it is with our bodies and souls, our embodied experiences are a gift to our souls. Our experience of the body, of time as limited, of life as temporary, that all adds meaning to the story of our soul. I don’t know if our souls would have the depth of meaning they do if they never got to live in a body. I guess that is something for all of us to contemplate. I always thought that my body needs my soul to survive but my soul can survive just fine without my body, and now I just don’t know if that’s true. I feel our souls crave being embodied for a reason. Perhaps instead of asking ourselves who am I, we can ask ourselves who am I as this body. And as the body ages and changes, so does our soul’s experience as body. So perhaps there is no one answer to this question, and perhaps we will never be able to grasp the full meaning of what we are asking, but nonetheless I believe it is always valuable to ask. Often more interesting than the answers we get in this life are the questions we ask. So let your curiosity and questions guide a new sort of relationship between your soul and body. One where neither control the other, but rather cooperate together to create a beautiful life worth living.

And so as we come to the end of this contemplation, I would like to take a moment to express my deep gratitude for this body that gives me the opportunity to live and experience life from a very unique point of view. My body is not perfect. And neither should it be. Perhaps now that I understand that even though I have the privilege to be alive, that aliveness does not entitle me to a perfect body, whatever that means, neither does it entitle me to a healthy body or a strong one. All that it really entitles me to is the opportunity to breathe. And with this gift of the breath, I may do with it what I choose. So, what I aspire to now is to be the best possible soul I can be for my body. Instead of only just thinking of all the ways in which my body can serve my soul, I realise now that it might be useful too to consider all the ways in which my soul might be of service to my body. Because in this embodied experience of living, it is the body’s wellbeing or lack thereof that can either extend or cut off soul’s time here on Earth. So when body is well, soul can continue to inhabit body. But when body falls sick, it will start to push soul out of it. May we all learn to love and nurture these bodies that carry us our entire lives.

With love and always for peace,

S.A.

Dear quarter lives,

Do you think there’s a path already laid out for us? Or do we actually carve out our own lives? Perhaps it’s a little bit of both. Perhaps we have a fate and we choose it too. Perhaps we choose the kind of tool we use to carve, but what we carve might be predetermined.

But how does one choose what is certain? How can one possibly fulfill what is meant to be? To choose, to fulfill, perhaps what they both are are acts of acceptance. The doing that which makes the path more agreeable. For undoubtedly, there is suffering on every path, but perhaps all suffering stems from some lack of acceptance. The saying — flow with the tide not against it — encapsulates the power acceptance can have over our experience of living, just as swimming with the tide can alter one’s perception dramatically of the ease or difficulty of swimming in the sea. Perhaps we each have our own tides that, no matter what, are already taking us somewhere, and all we have to do is swim along with them. Although this might all sound simple, it is not so easy to do in practice. Many of us find it very challenging to just let ourselves flow with the tide. Many of us feel the need to control the tide. Many of us can’t seem to just accept and let the tide take us where it will. And that is what I would like to sit with today. I am not interested in arguing whether or not acceptance facilitates one’s life, but rather why does one resist acceptance if we can clearly see the benefit of doing so. Why do we resist that which will make us suffer less? What is that all about? Are we creatures more inclined to suffering than to ease?

I think for me it comes down to confusion. I struggle to recognise and see clearly which direction the tide is heading. And so if I can’t see which way is forward, I don’t know when I am resisting and when I’m trying to go with the flow. I don’t think we are inherently masochistic creatures that take pleasure in making ourselves suffer. I just think most of us can’t tell the direction of the tide. And the only way to tell the difference is to stop all movement for a moment, and see which way the tide carries us. The only way to know is to surrender to the ocean of life and trust that when we stop moving all our limbs, we won’t sink to the bottom and die, or get left behind. And that very act of faith, of trusting that which we cannot see, is what carries us forward and through all the fear. And when we do let go, the ocean will undoubtedly carry us. But I guess that certainty isn’t so easy to believe. Understandably, we are afraid to stop swimming for this one moment. We are afraid because we don’t know how to trust that which we cannot see. The thing is when you are in the ocean, you can’t see it, the water is there all around you but you can’t see it. Unless you pop your head out of the ocean, you won’t be able to see it. But we must remind ourselves that we can feel it. We must remind ourselves that we don’t just see with our eyes. We see with all our senses. We see with our skin. With our hearts. With our ears. We see with our toes and fingers. We see with our breath. We see through our interactions with each other.

I find in the very brief moments where I do choose to let go of my grip on control and go with the flow, it does feel much less exhausting. But a few moments later, I think I’ve figured out where the tide is taking me and I don’t like what I see so I start swimming in the opposite direction. I forget all about how much harder it was before and I start doubting whether I am in fact heading towards ease. And once I am engulfed by this whirlpool of doubt, I am back again to swimming against the current and in this state of confusion where I can’t seem to remember which way is forward, and I start all over again this process of negotiating with myself that it is safe for me to let go again, that I can trust I will be okay, that I will be held. And I rinse and repeat, and on and on goes this cycle of remembering and forgetting that I am essentially not a fish in the ocean, but I am the ocean itself so there is nowhere for me to sink, and nowhere for me to go, but here. Just as fate intended. Perhaps that is the only fate there is — to remember one is the whole ocean and not just a fish.

I recently learned that the roots of the word confusion come from the Latin word — confundo — meaning to fuse with, to mix, to blend. Perhaps that is what it is all about — to mix and blend with it all until we become One.

With love and always with the intention of cultivating peace,

S.A.

Dear quarter lives,

Sometimes we build relationships, habits, beliefs in our lives that serve only as ladders and stepping stones that help us build and heal ourselves in places and in ways that would’ve been otherwise impossible to do without. Very much in the same way scaffolding allows builders to work buildings and edges of buildings, there are structures in our own lives that we’ve built that serve a temporary purpose and after which they must be removed. The difficult part is knowing which is the scaffolding and which is the main structure, especially when you’ve been working your inner building for years. It might be hard to tell the difference between what is temporary and needs to go and what is permanent and needs to stay.

Currently, I feel that at least on one side of my inner building the time has come for me to remove some of these impermanent bonds that I have created. Some of these are with people and places, others are with the less tangible world of beliefs. Today, I’ll only speak of one of them, and that is hope. Hope if you hadn’t already noticed flourishes in times of crises. It helps lift us and move us forward one small step at a time. But hope I am now understanding can only take us so far and for so long, after which its expiry date arrives and it must be carefully laid down and put aside. The scaffolding of hope if used even when it has gone rusty will poison the blood of its user and fill their hearts with delusions until instead of moving them forward, now hope is keeping them put in the same place and only deceiving their minds that they are still moving forward. Hope is tricky. It is slippery. It is a sword that possesses as most things do edges on both sides. Hope can help you see the light when your eyes cannot, but hope cannot bring back anyone from the dead, including ourselves. We cannot hope ourselves to remain as we once were.

And so the time has now come for me to say goodbye to my scaffolding of hope. Thank you for carrying me forward. I have come far. I have leaned on your walls and cried over your steps. I have grown lean climbing up and down your bars. I have grown ever more present as I’ve learnt to avoid your holes. I believe this is the end of our relationship, at least for now. You have allowed me to imagine many lives for myself. You have taught me much about the art of dreaming. Thank you. Now I must do the rest on my own. I must walk now using my own two feet. I am afraid, but I know in my heart that if you stay with me, I will be robbing myself and my future of something very precious and that is my own will.

You see, the next stage to develop and strengthen our inner buildings is to put them to the test — are they capable of standing alone and tall without the help of any scaffolding? And so when we put down hope, we are not falling instead into despair; what we are doing is that we are no longer using something to lift us up because we no longer need it — we are already up. We are done. The building is complete, or at least all the foundational floors and walls are. And it is our Will that Hope has allowed us to rebuild. It is our will now that must stand on its own. It is our will now that will carry us forward. But we must never forget how hope has helped prop us up when our will was down. And that is always when hope arrives — when our will is down. But to continue to use hope when our will is already up, is to tell our will we don’t trust it. Be mindful of the pace your will is able to charge forward on its own. We are all built differently after all. Some of us run before we even walk. Some of us crawl. Others do some combination of all three. It doesn’t matter what your pace is, so long as you do it and learn to lean on your own will.

May we all have the courage to remove the scaffoldings we no longer need. May our walls be filled with will, and our hearts filled with trust to lean on them.

With love and always for peace,

Shahinda

Dear quarter lives,

There might not be a single reason that causes one to dwell, but we can all agree that when we dwell a feeling of wanting to go back takes over and drives us to a fictitious new future. And so I would say that ultimately we dwell when we realise in our present we have reached a definite end of sorts, that from this point onwards from our present there is no way to get what we are deeply desiring. Unless of course, we go back in time. And so dwelling takes us back in time, but not for the purpose of staying there but to allow us to act differently and reroute to a new future, a future that is different from our present in especially one way — that it has what we want. And so the only way to get to what we want is to go to this alternate future and the only way to get to this alternate future is to go to the exact point in the past where the paths to this alternate future and our current present forked off, to go back to the point where things could’ve still turned out differently. So it is the unchangeability and definiteness of our present that usually drives us back in time. But what happens when we go back in time and we realise that what we are trying to capture keeps on slipping through our fingers? What happens when we realise we really can’t change the present even if we time travel? What happens when we find ourselves knocking on a door that’s not there? Well we must do as all people do when they get lost — we cry. And then we cry some more. In part because we are afraid, and in part because we finally have reached a point where we can grieve what could’ve been. Not because we are suddenly wise. No not at all. But it is because we have only just now exhausted all the fuel in our capacity to dwell, to wish things were different and to even try to get things to be different. And it is only at this point of emotional exhaustion, after our minds have done millions of years of time travel, only now are we ready to say goodbye to that point in time when things could’ve been different and finally surrender to our present and say yes this is it — I accept you. And when we finally do, something magical happens. The door that was seemingly locked is locked no more. And we realise that perhaps we have not reached a dead end after all, that there is still somewhere for us to go, that all that was needed to unlock this door was our own grief. And so in saying goodbye to what could’ve been, we open the doors to what can be. So long as there is a future, we cannot stop ourselves from dreaming. Perhaps even, it is the very act of dreaming that brings our futures to life.

So instead of trying to wish your dreams of a new future away, accept them, make peace with them, let them drive you forward. Let them motivate you to create even if it is not them you end up creating. Fantasy, dreams, dwelling — they are all made of the same fabric — hope. Hope can sometimes deceive us, but it can also be what carries us when our own two feet cannot. And so with that in mind, let us not condemn ourselves for dreaming, let us not punish our thoughts for taking us on a ride, let us instead hold ourselves in this space of fantasy and first ask ourselves why we have come here. Why have we chosen to reside today in a place of fantasy rather than reality. Is it because our reality scares us? Or perhaps is it because in our dreams we are in control of what happens, something we crave to feel in our reality. Whatever your particular reason is for dwelling, it is valid.

With love and always for peace,

S.A. 

Dear quarter lives, 

Everything, every interaction we have, almost always begins with us introducing ourselves. And so, it becomes engrained within us, that whenever we go out into the world, even just outside of ourselves within our own families, we must differentiate ourselves, we must be us and they them. I am me, and she is her. So we have boundaries and things that separate us from one another, like names, like appearance, voice, and many many other things amongst which are our beliefs, our religion, our lifestyle, our movement practices, our career choices, our views on money, politics, the economy, the environment, our views on love. And so it happens to be that in order to really be able to identify ourselves, we must be able to differentiate ourselves. And the better we can separate ourselves from the world, the better we can identify ourselves. But like all that exists in life, balance is key and even things like identification can go so far as to isolate us. Because to have community and to build connections, we must share some commonalities, be they our language, our history, religion, beliefs, shared tv shows, a shared sense of humour, all these are things that bring us closer to one another. And just as it is important to separate ourselves within even our own families, it is important too to find that which connects us and binds us to them. And so it is with our friends and our communities.

And so there appears to be a fine line we must carefully walk between our need for identification and our desire for connection because both tug at us in opposite directions; one requires of us to distance ourself from the world and the other requires us to lose ourself in it. Neither extreme is healthy. On one side too much identification can cause us to feel a deep sense of loneliness, as though we are alone in our existence, as though we are living our own reality far, very far away from everyone else. And this isolation, this loneliness, can come because we feel we are so different, so identified, so unlike everyone else, that there is no space for us in the world with “everyone else”. Because in our minds “everyone else” is the same and we are— different. 

Now let’t talk about what happens on the other end of the spectrum, on the end where one has forfeited completely their desire to separate and just meshed themselves completely with their surroundings. These individuals who let go of their own identity become part of a larger collective. And to belong to this collective, whether it is a family unit or a political faction or a football fan club, one must check themselves out as a separate individual with separate wants to enter into those spaces. And ironically for the collective to exist, it must identify and separate itself from other collectives. And so it becomes, that in a community setting too, we must still adopt an identity, but it’s not an individual identity that belongs to a single individual, it belongs to everyone who is part of the group. In the community, the individual identity must dissolve so that the group identity can emerge.

 Let us zoom out for a moment, and consider the whole world, the whole earth, as one unified large community. Let us consider ourselves for a moment gone. And let us then consider ourselves here as Gaia, as Mother Earth herself. Let us for a moment create this space within us for sharing. Sharing ourselves with our home. Sharing ourselves with our fellow living beings, and sharing ourselves too with all the beings that have ever lived and died, all the beings whose remains made our lives possible, let us share ourselves. Let us share ourselves some more. And now that you’ve shared and shared, even though for a “good cause”, it is for our collective “HOME” after all. But how do you feel? Do you feel depleted? Or do you feel energized? Do you feel like you need to speak and hear your own voice, just to make sure “YOU”, the separate You is still here. Or do you feel relieved that you no longer have to worry about your own worries and instead can carry the burdens of the whole. Do you feel sad for all the losses our Great Mother has endured? Or do you feel numb, unable to allow yourself to share in the pain, because you know you will get lost? Whatever your answers were, they will have said something about how comfortable you feel letting go of yourself and sharing or the opposite how hard it is to let go of yourself and instead find comfort in clinging tightly onto yourself. There is no right or wrong. But there is always a tendency we have. And we all spend our lives finding our balance, going through periods that literally pull any identifiable floor from underneath us, and so it is important to know which way you are inclined to move in a crisis so as to be mindful not to steer too much over into one extreme over the other. 

I, myself, know that I seek identification when in a crisis. I want to immediately know who I am, where I am relative to everyone else. In a crisis, I know if I’m not mindful, I will isolate myself. I will retreat. When I feel lost, the way I know how to find myself again is by separating myself and constantly identifying myself relative to the world. Others when lost will only know how to identify themselves through the crowd. They will reach out, they will connect and they find comfort in others. Again, there is no right. What I try to practice now away from right and wrong is more of a conscious balancing, and that means if I’m used to dealing with something a certain way, I’m open to trying to deal with it differently. I’m open to for example finding myself through community and connection instead of identification. I am open. And this opening can be for a moment, it can be for a whole day, or perhaps it can be my new way of being, who knows. Perhaps if I can reassure my mind that it is in no danger by merging with a collective for a bit, perhaps if my mind is quiet, I will find that this is what my body has been calling for this entire time. And it is true in a sense, our bodily desires all ask us to merge with the world. Our bodies hunger for food and sex, and thirst for water and love, so perhaps this identification-connection dynamic is one whose balance requires us to harmonise the relationship between our minds and bodies. Each must surrender leadership and vow to work together and lose themselves for the good of the whole human — for the good of YOU! 

May we all find ourselves, alone and together. May we all hear our own voices as we take part in the collective SONG. 

With love and always for peace, 

Shahinda Abdalla 

Dear quarter lives, 

Can you recall the first time you ever experienced loss? Can you recall the first time you expressed your grief? Was your grief met with open arms or were you told to put it away? What about your most recent experience of loss, can you recall it? How did you meet your grief then? Were your arms open? Were you even there in your body to meet it? They say we learn how to meet our own grief by seeing how our grief was first met by another.

I recently learnt that grief has many ways of making itself visible. It has more colours than a rainbow. It has more shades than blue. It sounds like everything between laughter and wailing. It feels like everything from a punch in the stomach that steals your breath away to feeling ecstatic like you’ve only just come alive. Despite the many guises grief wears, you can be certain that it is bound to show up on your doorstep at some point. And if you are unable to meet it, it will stay there and camp out on your yard until you do. And grief isn’t too bothered about time like we might be, it will stay and make itself at home sometimes for decades. But the danger when it stays for this long is that it really does begin to make itself at home, taking away from our own space that would’ve otherwise been dedicated to something else. It will use your energy until you barely have any left for anything other than grief. And that is usually when most of us finally give in and meet our grief. But why wait till then? Why put it off for so long? Yes, obviously it can be painful and uncomfortable, but what I’m asking is what makes it so? Why is it so hard for us to accept our grief, to acknowledge it, and recognise it? 

When I’ve contemplated my own resistance to grieving, I’ve found that I resist grieving when I’m not ready to accept the loss, when I’m not ready to accept the finality of it. And if I allow myself to grieve, to go through the process of accepting the loss, I would in fact be recognising that it’s okay for my life to go on without this thing, that it’s okay for me to be this way, that this new normal is okay. And that, I think is the hardest part for most of us because it does feel like if we allow ourselves to grieve, that somehow we would be agreeing with how things have turned out. We might mistake accepting for agreeing, thinking if we do one, we are doing the other, but I do believe they are different. Perhaps it is a very subtle difference. But isn’t the art of living after all about mastering the subtleties. This mixing up of agreement and acceptance often happens when we are dealing with others too. Many of us might resist accepting someone else’s view if it’s different than their own, thinking that in accepting another we are agreeing with them. But that isn’t the case at all. Acceptance is merely the act of seeing something for what it is, not what we’d like it to be, or what it ought to be. Acceptance is therefore not dependent on anyone’s moral, cultural or religious beliefs. Acceptance is dependent solely on our humanity and willingness to open our eyes to the truth. Yes, sometimes the truth can be painful. Sometimes the truth might not be to our liking. And sometimes the truth itself is temporary making it very difficult for us to capture it and box it up in a single space and time. 

Acceptance does not happen all at once, and neither does grief. We grieve and accept in layers. In layers of ourselves. In layers of time. Even in layers of people. Until we finally reach the core of what we need to grieve and accept — and that is Life herself. The Life that we were born into, the Life that separated us from our mother’s womb, the Life that is full of danger and disappointments, the Life that we had hoped Life to be but isn’t, and so we grieve and grieve until we can finally accept the Life that is, the Life that is actually here, actually happening. We grieve until we can open our eyes again and take in reality. We grieve until we are ready to take in the truth. And as long as we keep on living, we never stop grieving, because we never stop opening our eyes to new truths. 

And when we can finally accept our lifelong relationship with grief, we can then begin to turn our attention and energy into how we can make space for grief and embrace it, instead of pushing it away. How can we grieve in community without it being just about the darkness? Because grief only gets darker when it is  shunned, but when we make space for it, we offer grief a chance to take a lighter form. So how can we celebrate grief? How can we create rituals that mark its flow through us? How can we dance grief away? Can we sit in circles and share stories of grief and loss? Can we share food and drink, and music too? For the sake of our humanity, for the sake of all children now struggling to make sense of all the deaths happening around them, we need to make space for grief so we can make peace with it.

With love and always with the intention to bring a little more harmony into your lives, 

S.A.