Notes on Grief

The is like swimming in mud, through a texture of thick viscosity, numbed and etherial, exhausting. There are flights of fancy: the mad playhouse of returns to past months, that, not this love; of beginnings, tenuous fragile and beautiful as shoots of grass in spring, heart-breakingly tender, full of wonder. Laugher comes easier,

Am I 90 percent spirit? Is this the way I go? Is the pain as much for a world that exists but is so crushed by doubt and fear? Childlike wonder, fascination with the human ... are the shells bandages which I have take such comfort beneath? Am I by nature vulnerable, and make mad leaps to unburden myself of the shell?

I have said the circle brought out the best in me, or rather that I wanted the best -- and it does -- and yet the relationship was an image for a much more intimate and vulnerable circle -- spiritual dynamics there quite vast. Trying to do the best in that relationship failed -- for the footing of becoming the best, the full manifestation or unfoldment of my seed, was not rooted. As I learn this greater dance, so perhaps might the finite/infinite circle with her be renewed. There is still such deep trust there -- mixed in with a clinging that slows, eases. Again, such hope -- not for her and me but for the blessings intimated there, ones I can learn from.

The conversion takes a lifetime -- to convert to living, to being the essence of the life given to me, to root and re-root, uproot, root yet again, digging deeper into the foundations of mystery.

There are baptisms -- the celebration of birth, the baptism by others to offer thanks for the mystery of life; the baptism of self - to grow aware of a distinct center within, a personhood like a slow unfolding flower; the baptism of God, to grow aware of a vital presence of mystery that somehow runs beneath or behind ego, revealed in the paradoxes and mysteries of life; the baptism of love, to find such mystery in another person, to revel in such mutual depth, to grow aware of communion that reveals that beyond all there still is life, perhaps dimensionally different but in essence the same.

-- journal 1981