“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”
— Rumi
As time goes on, the tsunami begins to ebb and flow almost seasonal-like; it will come out of nowhere and seep up into your awareness until it takes over those spaces reserved just for this type of incidents; sorrow, reminding us of loss and, yes, growth, in that you begin to notice that it hurts less when it comes. It is a gradual acceptance of things as they are. You begin to realize that you survived what felt like you could not. It brings with it fresh knowing that you are somehow changed but that that change was hard won through resilience and our ability to adjust, to surrender, to give way to inevitabilities that something bigger than us manifested in our lives. That we were like children, hanging on to their mother’s hem, and being drug along as she changed and you ended up the better for the survival of it all without being totally undone, on your own, but a deeper soul because of it all. Somehow, we give up what we thought we could not and acknowledged how little control we have over it all.
Yes, you still feel it in your bones. You acted and reacted, as uniquely as you are a unique character in some Saturday Night Live sketch that was all adlibbed. When you dropped all pretenses, defenses and protectionism’ all the things you thought were required and expected; and simply let sadness be what it was/is. And we come to be at peace with that. We do not forget the chill and thunderstruck pain. It is there, just beyond the next memory, the next anniversary, that other revisitation to somewhere that was part of the definition of “us”. There will always be a bit of sadness around the edges. You cannot stop it. You cannot stuff it. You cannot pretend it never happened. You feel it because you will always remember it.
Sorrow is inevitable. It means we have been open and vulnerable to someone; that we loved; that we were greatly loved in return/or not. The point being...WE loved. We may look at it like it was something that was, but, in reality, it is truly something that always IS. Somehow the sorrow becomes a drive to be what we thought we were, what we thought that they wanted us to be. We learn what an honor it is to have cared that much.
We rebuild. We shore up that shaken house. We do some patch work. We make the best of what we see but others might never even guess at. We are a heart with a black wreath on the door. Only those close enough to enter will ever know. There will be moments that the blinds come down and night settles in for its time with us. There will be that slight drop at the curve of a smile. There will be times for that far away look in our eyes. But, in the end of it, will we dust ourselves off, polish things up, and look up to see something new and good enough just ahead of us: A houseful of old memories; the ones we choose to keep that reminds us how capable of love we are.
©Carol Desjarlais 2.6.24
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