grief arrives

Grief Arrives
In Its Own Time

It doesn't announce itself or knock
on the door of your heart. Suddenly

it's right behind you,
looking with great pity

at the back of your neck
and your shoulders on which

it spends days placing a burden
and lifting it. Grief arrives

in its own sweet time, sweet
because it lets you know that

you are alive, time because
what you are holding becomes

the only day there is: the sun stops
moving, the sky grows utterly quiet

an impossibly blue. Behind the blue
are the stars we can't see and beyond

the stars either dark or light,
both of which are endless.


- Stuart Kestenbaum

One of my most notable magical gifts that I have been blessed with as far back as I can remember, is the gift of the right book, the perfect passage, the sentence I most need to read, finding its way into my hands at the moment I most need to receive it. I opened the Spiral Dance for the first time on plane ride to a funeral twenty-five years ago. In the months before my Feri initiation, book titles would sing to me from shelves, I’d open them to find a tidbit of knowledge that would open up either vistas of understanding or new vistas of questioning to venture down.

Today I opened up The Sun to this poem. Perfection. Grief has been a steady visitor to my therapy room this week, the tissue box is now half empty. This spring has been one of contrasts, warm sunny days followed by hard rains, followed once again by warm sunny days. The rain is washing away a lot, is cleansing. And then the sun comes out, brightly revealing what is tender and new. Well, that’s how it seems to me. This is a hard spring, and my clients are doing deep work, bringing up much from the underworld as Persephone rises.

And I’m no different. It struck me today that the black heart so core to Feri is of no use with grief. And dealing with grief, with loss, with suffering, is one of the flavors that explode on the tongue when I have bitten into what I see as the pomegranate of wisdom. The pomegranate gives me a juicy dark taste that life is sweet, that time is indeed elastic, and oh so relative. Feeling that black heart may help me to cry, to express my animal pain, but I need the green heart of consciousness to feel my place in the family of things, and then the pink heart of compassion to sense the endlessness of light and dark, and to fall in love with it.

Calling Daniel a few days ago, I breathed into all of these, I spoke from my hearts, leaving him a message to hold on. What grief he must be feeling. I imagine those hearts beating in my therapy room. Thump, thump, thump. David, who hung himself last spring, has been in my dreams, my father too. My father has moved on, is out there in the endlessness of the dark and the light, but David is still in a bardo state, that place in-between. I put protection around Daniel – who I can bet is feeling his brother's ghostly turmoil. And now his housemate adds to the haunting. The grief from suicide is such a twisted complex thing. It certainly adds another dense note to the pomegranate’s taste. And as I write that, I realize why I love this poem. I’m grateful. Thank you. Thank you Dad, thank you. Your curse is also a blessing. I know in my bones, hell, in my DNA that life is sweet. And I know also that time when breathed into, and then breathed out, can actually heal. And as Scarlett O’Hara said so beautifully, “Tomorrow is another day.”

Mercury is going direct today. I can feel it.