The following excerpt is from my notes app, dated 12/20/21. The heartbreak of the past few weeks reminds me that the spiral of time connects us to the past, present, and future. Reading these notes is like opening a time capsule. I relive and remember.
Death has come and sat on my web, thrumming it’s fingers over the fine cords that bind me to this world. I feel them shiver. Grief echos inside me; I am hollow, built for this purpose. I hear death like a conversation that travels across a body of water. The vast expanse, when still, makes voices carry far with little effort. I eavesdrop without knowing why.
But I do know why. I grew up gleaning: words, tones, movements, breath. I gathered it all like acorns and listened to them rattle against each other in the bottom of my basket. This would feed me. This knowledge of what others are feeling, cast off hints, glances - I gathered those before they dropped to the ground. Through these tailings I learn the stories that make up each moment. Beginning, middle, and end.
I watch, I listen, my attention sharp and focused. I gather everything to feel safe, to be prepared, to be well stocked when the first snow hits the ground. And so I listen as death makes its rounds of my ken.
“If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.”
-Louise Bourgeois
Before repairing the web, or perhaps a critical part of that repair, is holding space for what has been lost.
In my own solitude practice, grief plays a critical role. Creating space for grief and mourning rituals is like course correction. Honoring the path that brought you here and learning how to move forward.
To grieve constantly is perhaps the only thing I’m good at.
Over the past few years I’ve been cultivating space to tend to my personal grief, but lately I’ve been thinking about community grief. Where and how do we honor grief on a larger scale, especially when there are more degrees of separation between ourselves and the loss? No matter where we sit upon it the whole web shakes.
Part of having a positive relationship to solitude is nurturing your relationships to others, people, animals, plants, a river, a clearing in the forest, a garden. In the past I’ve thought “if only I can just become an island, my own self-sufficient ecosystem, I will never get hurt”. I have so much compassion for this line of thought and I still wander that way in difficult times. In the end I know my independence exists within an interdependent web of infinite connections.
This is all a work in progress; I’m still looking for the answers to the questions I ask here, out loud, and in my note’s app. Thanks for being here xoxo.