Grief is a… fill in your favorite word or phrase that best completes that sentence.

For the last three weeks and five days and counting, I have been wading through a liquefied glycerine suppository. They say a fish doesn’t know the water it swims in. I am in an atmosphere of hazy, incongruous gel.

They say I’m resilient. So I’ve learned to breathe under these conditions. I have my own version of gills. An adaptation, if you will. Darwin is proud. Somewhere over the Galapagos Islands, an energetic flutter of recognition… another species originates… a mutation to survive a harsh environment.

And that’s been my bag. I have adapted to your world by teaching myself to twist my being into shapes and positions to fit the specific locks for which most people are born as keys. I watch them seemingly seamlessly stroll through an aperture with perfect clearance. I follow through, stub my toe on the threshold, or bang my elbow on the frame.

I come back. Deep breath. Suck it in, suck it up, you got this.
Hold every muscle, every nerve, every bone, every fiber until I’m through.
Then keep that shape until I can come home and breathe again.

I’ve been doing this for… well, let’s see. I’m 49 years old now. I was forced through my very first doorway probably when I was three. Nursery school.
So I’ve been doing this for 46 years. Give or take a minute.

For 46 years, I have been holding the equivalent of a plank pose in my psyche, and I just can’t do it anymore.
Or… the thing that scares me even more is that I can keep doing it, but I fear that it will kill me.
Because it’s become a reflex. I don’t relax easily into relaxation.
I relax into this coiled state…. and my body only lets its guard down, only feels safe, when I’m home.

This was all coming to a head well over a year ago.

Then both of my parents got sick.
Really sick.
They took turns scaring the hell out of me until three weeks and five days ago my Mom… I still hate saying it. My Mom died.

And the grief has been tearing me to shreds.
I know that might sound needy or oversharing.
Our society hates when we let our feels flag fly too freely.
But I know I’m not the only person to ever go through this and I know I will not be the last person to ever go through this and I am astonished and enraged that we just let each other suffer in the name of arbitrary programming devised by The Banality of Evil Corporation™ that appears to pull the strings behind every mindless malady we choose to maim ourselves with.

So what have we learned?

I’ve learned that the only thing that can keep me above water right now is love.
Love is the center from which it all flows. If I work toward it, I work toward grace. If I work away from it, I become susceptible to toxicity.
Do my actions bring me closer to love, or farther from it?
It really is that simple.

And that love is what is tearing my psyche to shreds because it is the very love of that which is lost that feeds the empty churn in my chest.
So how do I move toward that love, that rages so painfully?

I create.

I let my hands start playing with words, lines, shapes, colors, and sounds.
Consciously or not, I surrender to the energies percolating throughout my being, my psyche, my soma, and the air around me, and let them weave into something meaningful.

I follow my hands, as they listen to my heart. I look at what they’re telling me, and we dance.

We have been doing this dance for a long time, but the last three weeks and five days have been a rinnce fada to “The Song That Never Ends.”¹
Life is alchemy and it’s all, as Ram Dass would say, “grist for the mill.”

And this is how we beat on against the current, to borrow from F. Scott Fitzgerald. He likened us to boats against the current being pulled back into the past.
Whitman wrote of eidolons.
Dickinson kindly gave Death rhythm and an Uber account.

Yesterday I pulled the Death card as my current situation.
No shit.

But there’s something interesting in Pamela Coleman Smith’s artwork in the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck.
Death rides a white horse wearing black armor. A king lies toppled in his path. But in the background a sun is rising, a ship is sailing, winds are blowing.
A clergyman pleads with Death, a young woman looks away.
But Death pays none of that any mind.
Death looks down on a child.
Not menacingly.
His hand reaching out.
It’s like he recognizes the cycle that we all endure.
Even kings fall, bishops beg, we all look away…
But we’re all children before the unfolding….

We started as children and as it all unfolded it wrapped around us in concentric circles like rings of a mighty sequoia until forces beyond us cut us down.

1. It just goes on and on my friends. ↩︎