Truth is intrusive, like an exposed screw that catches my loose threads,
and unravels what seemed so solid, so mendable.
We once had a dog that would fetch until it’s paws were skinless. We’d discover the wounds in shock, there was no indication he was in pain.
You say it’s like you’ve been running and discover your leg had been broken the whole time.
I think of Dr Margaret Mead explaining how a broken leg was a death sentence for our wild kin. A fossil of a healed femur shows the branching off- from a species that had to survive alone, or die; to one that was helped.
We cannot heal alone. When I say I love you, I mean that my mirror neurons fire freely at your joy and your pain.
Grief and gratitude are not a duality. They are a perfect dialectic.
Each breath is a gift, yes, but also a tether
to this fragile and tentative existence.
My best teachers taught me to return to my breath and find its softness; to let it spread through me.
To cease to breathe can also be a gift, a freeing, a small death.
We die not at once but in starts- the punctuated equilibrium of change within one lifetime,
and over eons. Each extinction we survive is a doorway
as life inexorably reinvents itself.
We can only see such a small piece of the story
to which we are inextricably bound, long after our time ends.
We can move back and forth, leaning into the uncertainty or fighting
the changes, bewildered and raw-knuckled. But one day, all that we have accumulated will be dust. Recycled, reimagined, conserved in the story.
What can we do, but meet what comes with humility, and the courage to want it all?
