The Light and The Dark

 



To be weighed down the the gray foggy mist. Chillness that is bone deep. All that sun dispersed by water in the air, keeping you insulated from its warmth. Grief is an all time job. It is self consuming so completely engrossing that life could be holding its hand out to you dancing to its mad rhythm and you do not even notice. Or if you do then you have no intention to break your melancholy because it is safe to be in rock bottom. It can't go any down, isn't that the very definition of rock bottom?

But just when you think you have reached it the ground slides from beneath you and you are in free fall until the next thud. It no longer hurts. I think you have become numb to the impact. It all seems like an endless continuum. It is in these moments you discover yourself. When you strip away all that is on you, what are you left with? What is so central to your being that can not be stripped away. If you have the courage to look yourself in the eye in this abyss you finally see what you are made of. What you stand for and what stands with you.

If you are one of those lucky few, you also may have that one person who had made the trip with you and is standing on the side lines, helplessly watching you in pain, waiting for you to reach out so that together you can both rise up. Leave the dank behind. Leave the baggage but keep the lessons. The invaluable lessons that are learned in the hours of tears and rage and sleepless nights alone.

If you rise up. When you rise up, it is rising from the ashes. What does not break you makes you stronger, brighter and softer. You enjoy the sun more and its warmth and the laughter and warmth around you. You hug more, love more and laugh more. Because less is not more. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dread

It was the dead of the night. Or was it? It could just as easily be the silence of the wee hours of the morning. She had flows halfway across the world and after a full day of being out and about she had crashed on the upper bunk of her niece's bunk bed. She had felt her niece being unhappy and heard her objections about not being asked faintly and as much as she wanted to respond she felt unable to open her eyes. Slipping into the abyss of exhaustion and jet lag and ...escape? At that point who could tell and who cared. This time in life was not about asking a lot of questions and soul searching. This was about keeping one foot in front of the other and rolling with the punches. So in that bone weary tiredness there was a piercing ring of a bell that got through the haze of her consciousness. It was her sister's cell. She wasn't sure whose. She had two. Sisters that is. She heard muffled conversation from across the walls. Her eyes flew open. In a few minutes her sister wa...
Read more

A picture is worth a thousand words

Image
  These orchards extend as far as the thin dark tree along this line, said Didi. I nodded thinking should I pretend to understand and nod along or ask clarifying specific questions because let's face it there were a lot of thin dark trees that seemed to fit along the line she was pointing at. I decided to hold my horses and questions for now. It has been a while since we had gotten a chance to talk to each other without interruptions from people around us or life in general. There was always something more important to do than to listen to each other's inanities or ramblings. I missed having the luxury of rolling my eyes at something my sister said as I was talking or listening to her on the other end of the line in one of our long long conversations on the phone. With life and increasing demands on each of our times from spouses and kids and work and did I say life? Those long conversations became shorter and less frequent. The problem with that is then you start thinking abou...
Read more