Folding In #48: When You Can't Hide
Living with thin skin and embracing (admitting) the fire of mid-life.
*Please listen to audio version for the connected guided meditation.
I dreamed I was visited by a healer the other night. As he touched my chest, he pointed out an area of my body that has been inflamed these days due to rosacea. My Chinese medicine doctor describes it as stagnant Chi or heat. The healer placed his hands on my chest in the dream, and said, "This is grief. I'd follow grief anywhere. It means you are fully in touch with and feeling your life". After leaning me over, shaking around a bit, wobbling my head back and forth, he helped me back up.
Grief. Fire. Red Hot. Flames. Love. Flushed. Unhidden, unbridled. Naked. Exposed. Outed.
The last few years leading up to turning 40 have been filled with grief for me. In a sense, I feel like I'm carrying a giant barrel of heavy watery grief on my head and splashing it all over every room.
"I would follow grief anywhere," he said. "It tells me you're alive."
My relationship with grief is complicated, mainly because I feel flawed because of it. I don’t love it. I feel like I've carried it since I was very young. Perhaps too young. Beginning with my first encounters with people in pain, fighting, storming around in small rooms, and slamming kitchen doors. In many ways, I have been grieving ever since I understood what life could mean. My innocence wore thin as the space between my youth and naivety widened. In the years of being splintered by motherhood, nursing a 14-year marriage with more love than I thought I had, and watching my parents age, grief has accompanied me. There is now a very palpable sense of foreboding, a sense that this life is a maze of sharp corners I have no choice but to confront. Love is what makes them sharp. Love pierces my heart daily. There is no telling what loss will do. Does this truth haunt me alone?
“This is grief, and I would follow it anywhere.”