Wrecked

"Try it.  If you’ve tried it before, try it again.  Find the smoldering ache of loss inside of you and soften into it.  Allow yourself to gently and lovingly explore exactly what it feels like to hurt in this way.  With compassion for yourself, disarm your wounded heart and breathe quietly inside the wreckage.  No need for fancy formulas or prescribed affirmations.  No goal.  Just be.  Right here.  Inside the fire of grief.  One breath in front of the other."
 -Mirabai Starr

What would need to happen in order for you to feel safe or strong enough to soften into your pain?
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Disarm your wounded heart and breathe quietly inside the wreckage. For certainly it is wreckage strewn across a desolate shore. Each piece of debris a memory, a moment, a mark against my heart. What do I need to walk along that beach and not brace against each precious, broken piece?

Laughs with friends, dinner with family, a nephew’s bear hug? A temporary salve instead of an armor. 

Sunshine? Tears? Whiskey? Perhaps but not enough.

Courage, strength? Even trust? Yes. But I do not have these. Not these days.

At the very least, I need some rest first. A respite from the hamster wheel of thoughts, the shoulder tension, the sleepless nights. I am just so exhausted.

I try to find the grief in my body, and it runs from me. I find it gripping my chest and go there to ask it ease up, please and thank you. Sometimes it may but only to dart off to the tips of fingers and toes to pulse and throb there. I chase after it and ask it to take a deep breath, to melt out. But, it just races up my nerves to bounce about inside my head. Boing, boing, boing around the circuits, making me feel dizzy. I whisper “shhhhhhh.” And it slides down my spine and sits heavy in my stomach, roiling my intestines until rock it, curled in a ball, into my bones. Where it leadens them. And, I give up. My grief has run me ragged.

Move it through they say. But it’s slippery and quick. And I just don’t have the energy to catch it. Even for a sweet hug and kiss on the tip of the nose. Like kissing a frog, but even a frog needs compassion. This grief is wily and outwits me every time.

I don’t have much to say these days. This is helping. This exercise of writing my grief. But, I’ve lost my grip on it. I can’t hold it still long enough to see it these days. I don’t know what it’s becoming or where it is going or how to hold to it. It is a wicked vapor that moves and changes, hardens into a different beast. And then, when I think, ah yes. I see you beast, and I can tame the beast I know. It is off again to smoke, to move to change to work some different dark magic on my soul. And it’s getting so tiring. The searching, the capturing, the attempt to love it, fight it, move it, only to have it dissipate within my hands. This cat and mouse game takes so much energy, but I’m afraid if I give it compassionate yet free reign against my bones, it will destroy me.

At best, all I have left is to observe it. Try not to judge it. I don’t have the energy to put the humidifier in storage for the summer let alone go chasing this grief that courses through my body. So. I’ll try to just walk through the wreckage and give hope to a day when I may be able to cradle each piece with loving reverence.