Liberation in grief.

I’ve been finding a great deal of liberation in my grief these days. In a world that gives us 100 daily reasons to be numb and indifferent, it’s a profound act of resistance to maintain your softness and sensitivity. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the tears forming in the corner of my eyes are from pain or from awe, because they seem to emerge from the same field of energy. The precision of identifying emotions is useful in some ways, but not if it limits your capacity to spill over the edges of the container of that emotion. 

I used to think grief was exhausting, but it’s because I didn’t give my permission to hold the paradox of the feeling simultaneous joy when the sadness moved through me. There is so much to be angry about. There are injustices in the world that run deep, embedded in the systems all around us; systems that have no mercy on the people that need it the most. But even in the pits of despair, flowers grow through the cracks in the cement, sunshine finds its way to our skin, and we get the rare privilege of living another day on this mysterious rock pummeling through space. It's also okay to know that your time on this planet is finite at the same time as wishing you could just sleep for a month straight. There’s room for all of it. 

Josh Schrei says, “What is left for us but to sing of separation? Sing of what it is to be wretched, and to be cast out, and to come from a divorced line, and to have ancestors that were killed and ancestors that did the killing. To sing of all that was lost. Sing the blues. 

The honesty of the blues, like the honesty of devotional music, is in its embrace of separation. Like, ‘honestly, great power, life isn’t so great today. And I’m feeling distant. I’m not feeling some seamless connection between myself and the land. I’m feeling far, far away.’”

And we can lean into the disconnect and find a moment of peace within the familiarity. There’s room for all of it.