When grief has you, let it take you.

Like a river, let its current carry you into the wild unknown.

Let it carve deep into the canyon of your heart, revealing how fully you love.

Let it crash against the shores of your hardened edges, making way for brazen beauty.

Let it soften your armor, confronting you with just how vulnerable it feels to sincerely care.

Let it wash you in the pool of your tears, dousing you in its nurturing comfort.

Let it command your unrestrained primal voice, unleashing the passionate wail of your belly.

Let it have its way with you, animating the creative force in all the spaces that have become listless and apathetic.

Let it flush you clean of built up decay and rot, freeing you of unprocessed grief.

Let it provision you with the courage to meet your shadows, the deserted and unmet parts thirsting for attention.

Let it loosen your grip on decorum, making you a savage lover of life ensuring it impossible for fear to take residence in your temple.

~*~
Sick to my stomach.
Shut down.
Immobilized.
Heavy.
Angry.
Agitated.
Bereft.

Convinced something is fundamentally wrong with me because I don’t know how to return to “business as usual”.

I’ve been at a loss for words.

I’ve only known what I feel.

War is inconceivable to me.

Evil twisted antics justifying violence and horrific harm.
Insanity manifest.
Wretched.
Unnatural.

War is unbearable. As it should be.

It’s the demonstration of our separation from what is holy and sacred.
It’s an extension of the distortion of “other”.
It’s dehumanization, a vindication of our lack of care.
It’s a construct built from malicious intent.

~*~

I struggle with how to metabolize this intense and vast level of duress.
I breath, pray and ask for guidance.
I weep, and it comes to me.

The power of grief.

I return to the truth that my feelings are not a symptom of being unwell or unevolved, but rather a sign that I AM well and relating sanely in hard times.

I yield to grief’s wisdom, knowing that if I do not surrender, it will find me in a version of war with myself.

My contribution in this moment to the dissolution and termination of war is raw grief.

My responsibility to the web of life is to keep clean, tending to my emotional and spiritual hygiene.

To ensure I don’t become indifferent, inflamed and unconscious of my own material that eventually would spill over with consequences to others.

To refrain from waging war on what’s foreign within me so that I grow my capacity to remain in kinship with the diverse interconnectedness that links us as one.

To inhabit grief as intimate care for life, walking the beauty way that elevates love over being right.
~*~
When grief has you, let it take you.

Let it help you make medicine out of troubled times.
Let it empty you entirely of the inconsequential, invoking the pure essence of what truly matters.

Let it return you home to the love soaked Soul you truly are.

With all that I am,

Kendra E Thornbury, MA