Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer
The last real stage of grief is usually accompanied by an ability to accept our losses, and to use what we have learned in order to role model the process of traversing the lonely realm from solitude to sharing, talking openly about how we overcame our loss, and then mentoring others on how they too can survive their own losses.
Loss can be the acknowledgement that a dream we’ve had of marrying the right person, of growing old together, of seeing our children outlive us, of being a good parent or spouse, of raising chilren whose lives are better for their having known us, or that the hopes we’ve had must be abandoned. This process is one of traveling through a sacred realm that challenges us to go not only merely beyond our comfort zone but to a place that stands so wrecklessly tall before us that it appears mockingly outmatching. We cannot do this. It hurts way too much. But people do survive cancer, the loss of a limb, a horrific burn, the loss of a child or a mate, and recently many have lost their life savings and are even now not close to recovering, some not even from the S & L crisis, and some never even made it out of the Depression back to their former prosperity.
All of us need help at one time or another, but regardless of the circumstance, we must also rise to the occasion and meet our calamity on our feet, straight into the wind, doing what we can to assist ourselves in our monumental struggle to free ourselves from our feelings of shame and unconquerable failure. We also, though, may have grown used to living as we do, having medicated ourselves with technology, or drugs, or food, or gossip, or critcism, or religion, or politics, or sports, or working out, or some other from of self-torture to keep ourselves from having to think at all about that upper stratosphere of rareified air, where the real work is done, the high altitude world of self-help where we become responsible for ourselves and face the demons of avoidance and denial, of shame and ridicule, of insecurity and the labors of living free in a world where all freedoms are granted, but few are claimed.
“Someday,” we say to ourselves, “one of these days, next summer, when I lose this weight, when my heart gets better, when I get out of this hospital, when my credit scores go back up, when the children get older, when I finally stop doing whatever it is that I should have stopped complaining about 20 years ago and had done with it, I am finally going to get it right. Well, isn’t it about time, right after I finish this cake; I hate to waste food.”
We never know how high we are (1176)
by Emily Dickinson
We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies—
The Heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the Cubits warp
For fear to be a King—
Lady of Amherst, Emily Dickinson, had a solitary desk at which she wrote and she never married. I, myself, have had occasion to sit at that desk and write poetry, in the bedroom of Emily D. Her 1800 poems rank at near the head of the class among all poets in American literature, and her peers are Whitman, Frost, and William Carlos Williams.
The Descent
by William Carlos Williams
The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned.
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment,
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
since their movements
are toward new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned).
No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since
the world it opens is always a place
formerly
unsuspected. A
world lost,
a world unsuspected,
beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness .
With evening, love wakens
though its shadows
which are alive by reason
of the sun shining—
grow sleepy now and drop away
from desire .
Love without shadows stirs now
beginning to awaken
as night
advances.
The descent
made up of despairs
and without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening:
which is a reversal
of despair.
For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
what we have lost in the anticipation—
a descent follows,
endless and indestructible .
So, we see, that the world of our struggles is an American, and thus by extension, a human problem to be dealt with. Not limited to men, or women, but children, too, have their own struggles. We think of ourselves too much, and not enough. We think of our struggles as staying, and yet we ourselves are passing, are we not?
So, then, regardless, the time itself is not the thing, not the determining factor, but rather the response. We find ourselves in a most peculiar position: To wait until such time as everything is perfect and nothing stands in our way, or rather if we are to make any sense of things as they stand, to jump head long into the maelstrom, not the male storm, but instead into the stream of life and come what may swim like mad to the destiny of the beach that calls us and there have our dream awakened. It is not even necessary to understand but to work as you go, shoulder to the task, insight and significance. Each step a victory is won, hard fought, for we are in the fight of our lives. Time rages at us with relentless and ruthless despair. We joke, “It’s not the years; it’s the mileage,” but then we may not have moved a muscle in a decade, not lifted a finger to wrestle with our demons. And, all of a sudden, we need to move and lack the strength?
Have no doubt, there is coming a day when everything you have ever learned will be presently needed and everything you failed to learn will be sorely missed. Let this then be a daily insight: Take to the distance of your reach, lean out and then push with all you’ve got, for My Friend. there is nothing new within your grasp, but beyond is the universe unclaimed by those who lack the courage and conviction to become themselves. “Why stand ye gazing?”
runningturtle87
