When the Ground Has Moved

laurenarara

11 minutes ago

3 min read

Grief and The Body

Dear gorgeous people,

Lately, I've been feeling into the ways grief and loss can disorient our relationship to ourselves, time, and the world around us.

How do we find safety again, when the ground has moved?

Sickle Moon

The place you used to lay

has been carved out of my front-body

Like an empty moon

Grief is like a sickle

Cutting me down to the barest

dry and exposed

my fruit harvested away by that unknowable

sweeping through, the vastest night-wings

And in the span of an absent inhale

My entire gravitational orientation buckles

Your breath pulled at mine like a tide

The polyrhythms of our beating hearts, a co-dependent kindling

of life

calling to life

Eye to eye, nose to nose, a knowing

And today.

When I know nothing.

And the fields are fallow

And the tides are shallow

and unmoving

I have to make a choice.

To listen for a drum.

To let the breeze draw out an inhale.

To know

even under the swooping shadow of the unknowable

the full shape of its blazing glory

Grief cuts into us. It carves parts of ourselves out. We can feel fragmented, broken, lost. We can feel empty, but heavy at the same time.

When death, or some big life change occurs, or when we feel the loss of someone, some part of ourselves, or some path we didn’t – or felt we couldn’t – take, it can be intensely destabilising. The very grounds of our life can feel unmoored.

It can feel impossible to move, to move forward, to keep going, to participate. We want to withdraw, cocoon, curl up.

Somatically speaking, our dorsal vagal parasympathetic survival response kicks in – we freeze.

We freeze because if we stop moving, perhaps the shifting grounds of our life may stop moving too. We freeze because we are looking for refuge amidst the perils of change threatening our life as we know it.

We freeze, in part, to stop time. To resist time. To resist what is.

But we also freeze because we have big, hurtling emotions moving through us that require us to turn inward and offer loving care. And this matters.

I am learning, again, ever and always, how to meet myself here. And I will be honest – I feel myself digging my heels in, being angry with the universe, fighting what is, refusing to accept the now, wanting to reverse time. And to my dismay, I do feel like I have succeeded in one way – old patterns of coping have returned. A younger version of myself that had to fight her way through challenge and was lost in a mindset of resistance, unease, and anger, is present right now. She refused to believe that life was in her favour. And as I type this, my dear friend Dicken, a robin that befriended me 4 years ago as a speckled fledgling, has flown to my desk, where he has been resting and chatting quietly with me for several minutes. He is telling me, in the mystical language that requires no translation, that I am no longer that 12 year old girl who needed to fight to survive. Here, in this little red-breasted, curious shape, life is calling to me. I am reminded that the universe is not against me. Here it is, in this fluffy little face, looking up at me and singing a song that warms the centre of my chest, kindling the very centre of my being. Here is life, asking me not to curl away, gently pulling upwards at the corners of my mouth, as I watch this little bird dance across my desk.

Yes, feel the sadness, the love, the fear, the anger, the bitterest poignancy of loss. Feel it – to love yourself back to life. Feel it – to reunite yourself with the divine love around you. Or visiting you at your desk. This is the restoration of wholeness. The filling of the moon, the returning of the tide, the integrating of our divided parts back together.

It is as simple as love. An inward embrace. And then an outward glance. Offer kindness to our hurt, and notice the kindness already holding you.

When we can open our eyes to what is here, we realise that life is still beckoning us forward. To keep living, to move our bodies, to dance in the messy is-ness under the sickle moon.

From here, we choose. And even if you refuse to meet the eyes of the robin today, that opportunity for choice is here for you in every moment. Whenever you are ready. Over and over again.

May you meet yourself with loving kindness.

May that kindness bring you towards wholeness.

May you remember that regardless of whether you feel whole or broken, you are always welcome, held, and loved unconditionally by life itself.

www.TheKora.co.uk