The season of the sun is slip-sliding, untying and transitioning into autumn, preparing the way for the dreamtime of winter. Are you ready?
Here in the north the garden offers their bounty of a few beans, thick stands of chard and kale, and the most beautiful rose. i find myself spellbound by their layers of color, fragrance and the way the light both lands and shines through this glorious blossom. I feel porous to the poignancy of this thin, transition time.
The past two weeks packs of coyotes have come into town with their weyward and wyrd sound. Their hunting song. This bright skirl coming in through the still open windows arrives with the gloaming, in the belly of the night, and this morning at dawn. I feel the ancient pulse of this - their urgent hunt and the fear and surrender of their prey becoming food.
Last week we buried a dear beloved under the singing pines. Our black cat, Pippin. He was our love - a rascal, a sweetheart, as close of a companion as a cat could be, and the sovereign of our household. So, we are grieving and out of sorts in the way grief can allow for if i have the willingness to surrender to it, and the privilege of time and space .
It's been some years since I've fallen into the well of grief. This grief experience born of the loss of our Pip, and any undigested grief from past losses offers me deeper access to life, a new level of porosity. The sun seems brighter, the taste of pear sweeter, heartache harder than I remember.
Does anyone go completely willing, fully giving oneself to grief? Modernity has not prepared us for this. And even though I have direct experience with many. many deep and dear losses and the well of grief, oh, i resisted the depth of feeling, the raw, bright shock of this reacquaintance. Until I didn't, couldn't. Only then could I descent into the well, into that ancient alive water there at the bottom of the well, in the deep dark, waiting, silent, fluid and ultimately nourishing. Nourishing in the same way the wild hunt and kill of coyote can be.
It's all a feast.
There are infinite ways to speak, write, weave with the cycle stories of ebb and flow, shed and shine, degeneration, regeneration. Soon the garden will die back, becoming the compost to feed the seeds of next spring. The ancestors are reminding me their season of honoring is nearly at hand.
How are you meeting your grief? Is it there smack dab in front of you or is it quietly and insistently singing their song just beneath the skin? Perhaps your grief is clean. May it be so.
And each day the sun rises just a bit less from the horizon, roses bloom, robins flock. Tis the way.
A poem from Borealis Mundi - Resting in Place, Loss & Grace
The Well of Grief
Grief, the tiger that devours,
The strawberry that feeds,
The oven that bakes,
The ice that melts,
The bread that feeds.
Grief, the spell that casts,
The stone that skips,
The wound that bleeds,
The river that carries,
The raven that devours .
Grief, the spark that ignites
The avalanche that buries,
The wolf that kills,
The ring that weds,
The lover that ravishes.
Please join me in celebrating the season, our porous aliveness and the power of story at in person and virtual events this autumn
Blessing of equipoise, equanimity and sweet Equinox release,
Tracy