Ken in the deep woods
In the past two weeks, the Royals lost the World Series, my favored candidate for governor (when the stakes were outrageously high) lost the election, a dear friend lost her daughter and several other friends lost their lives or are reeling from the loss of their best beloveds in recent months. The tumble of leaves from trees don’t help, but this bright and abiding sun does, as does hugging each other, and leaning into the tender side of loss.
“I don’t know how I’m going to live through this,” my friend told me a few days after her beautiful 38-year-old daughter died. “Breath by breath,” I answered, easy for me to say because I’m not ripped apart by pain so deep that simply taking the next breath is hard, let alone getting out of bed. Yet this is what loss has continually shown me through my own experience and through what I witness of others surviving such agony.
Some of these losses aren’t life-shakingly important (I mean, it was just a game, and the Royals may go all the way next year). Some change everything, a stone in the center of the pond that actually ripples out to change the shape and depth of the pond. Some make some of us want to run to a kinder land, but there’s no escaping where we’ve landed. All ferry us to the tender side of life where each moment is seeded with astonishing beauty, expansive depth, chevrons of geese calling us awake, and traveler moons charting us asleep. How we treat each other matters the most now (and always), witnessing one another’s impossible pain by letting our hearts and arms open.
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