winding this up -

i'm distributing my readings and books on grief. i can feel the torn fibers wanting to heal in my heart and i'm doing what i can to encourage that. i have worked so hard on this mourning stuff and, guardedly, i can say i feel a forward movement. and i am recognizing that the days that i don't want to get out of bed or talk to anyone or do anything much but cry, those periods of time are lengthening. i don't miss my mom any less, i will never miss my mom any less, but those times of howling wilderness, they visit me less. and, again, for that i am grateful.

grief and mourning, my experience of these in any case, i see as kind of a metronome. life swings way far to the joys of life; these times are the good punctuations in my life; love, good good times; EXTRA good times. and that weight swings over, from time to time, and totally out of my control, to the other side: loss, sadness, death. but mostly life is spent in that middle place, going from one to the other and thank god for that.

i have always been a big fan of Life with the capital L - but i've done that in frank denial about the loss end of this thing. i saw the sad/loss part as the "other," not part of my own experience, an interruption of it. but to take the buddhist view of it - it is the whole thing. it is no less part of my life than the parts i would accept invitations from. and it's the part that makes the ordinary life and the extraordinary life appear so Technicolor for me.

doesn't mean it doesn't suck and hurt and feel like shiat - but that's part of it too.

the whole enchilada.