My apprenticeship with sorrow

I am not sure how or when I began my apprenticeship with sorrow.

I do know that it was my gateway back into the breathing and animate world.

It was through the dark waters of grief that I came to touch my unlived life...

There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive.

Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief.

Inspired by the words of Francis Weller in his writing in "the wild edge of sorrow". He has been a guide, a teacher, a companion on that road of recovering all the ancient parts in me that have made grief the exiled friend.

Maybe it started when I was born and suffered the loss of contact with the primordial essential touch of my dear mother.

Maybe it was fed through forgotten memories of the loss of love, care, or unanswered needs in relationships.

Maybe it was sustained by the broken dreams, the lost friends, the broken promise of lovers, the ultimate reality of the presence of suffering in life.

Those are now the times when I could not escape it anymore. The ravage of death in my relatives and elders this year. The amplified presence of grief around me. The hopelessness of so many as…