Doing The Days 2: Transition

I’ve really wanted to finish Andrew Harvey’s book “The Hope” and maybe write a real review of it. I promised myself one, more or less, when I began it. I was highly hopeful. So far it’s been good in that way I was anxious for it to be. It’s got a lot of Andrew Harvey in it. But other things break in like the smell of Earl Grey tea. Like grief. I guess I’m not quite done with either of them yet.

I’m fully stuck on my old-friend book “Early Morning,” now, but before that it was "The Dialogues," and then the feeling of needing to read a snippet or two of Elizabeth Lesser’s “Broken Open.” Today I remembered that I wanted that book for hearing Elizabeth say on the radio that she loves grief. It came back to me in that same way grief-related things have been doing. The last few days.

The last few days.

When I put down Andrew Harvey’s book he was talking about suicide, a sort of living grief that makes you want to die, and the danger it can be to the activists who come to know too much about suffering. It’s one of the reasons he chose to add “sacred” to activism – the idea of being really grounded in the sacred before you take on too much. If you take on too much without that grounding you can grow bitter, angry, despondent, or just plain hurt too much to go on.

The thing is, when a wave of grief hits you almost three years later, about a year-and-a-half after everything started to feel less raw and tender, you wonder more about it and if it has something to do with the present.

You wonder, What’s going on inside of me?

That kind of question can get too heady, almost like a means of escape from feeling what you feel. “Let’s root out the source. Let’s understand it and be done with it.”

Maybe I’ve already done some of that. Maybe I’ve said enough or too much. It feels gentle though, and I say that because of a letter I got today: a Course of Love reader asking me how you know. How do you know your feelings as they are? Without thinking about them? I said, in that way that surprises me sometimes, (as if I’ve found the right thing to say by accident), that you can tell by the gentleness.

A feeling like grief can feel awful and still be gentle…even when you’re thinking about it.

So I’m re-visiting grief. Or it's re-visiting me. Gently. That’s what I’ll say. We're sharing a visit. And I’m aware that we're visiting for a reason. I don’t know what it is, (even though I’ve had some clues) but I’ll accept that I don’t know.

I hope the grief doesn’t have anything to do with the fights I’ve had with my daughter the last few days, but it might. How do you know (when you don’t know)?

We suffered a loss the other day because of our general financial situation. Our finances seem all intertwined and that gets to you for one thing. But a loss is a loss. My husband, with more Course of Love-like language than me, says it’s no loss. My daughter doesn’t see it as much of one either. Me, the perennial worrier – the “spiritual” person who shouldn’t be this way – is feeling the losses.

Transition

So tonight “The Dialogues” joins the list of signs (or whatever they are). Doing another day of the 40 Days, what do I notice? All the talk about transition.

At this point, all I can say is that “transition” sounds a lot better than change and loss. We go through what we go through for bigger reasons than appear to be. This much I know.