Feasting on the Abundance of Pine Nuts …
Pathos is especially present in grief. When someone you love has died, it takes a long time to learn the art of inhabiting the loss. John O’Donohue (Beauty: The Invisible Embrace)
These words from O’Donohue’s essay To Learn How to Inhabit Loss greeted me this morning as I opened a favorite O’Donohue book, wondering about today’s post and how Muse would engage.
The title drew me in. His words drew me deeper. After reading a bit more, I fell into a deep sleep. Waking an hour or so later I felt alone with their beauty and their depth.
Although curious about the relevance, no words rose in me as I picked up my pen and stared at a blank page. It seemed that Muse had stepped aside guiding me to be with the question: How do I inhabit loss?
It isn’t an unfamiliar question, having come up in recent conversations each of which recalled my own journeys in the wake of death – my father’s when I was a teen, mother’s 43 years ago followed by a close uncle two weeks later, beloved canine Cool Hand Luke three years ago, my cousin just two years ago, and of being present with friends as they have danced with loss of beloveds.
Looking back, I see that each taught me something about inhabiting loss, that I was somehow blessed that grief didn’t pull me down, and that I found good and the beauty in each loss. Not only for me but for the departed one. Sometimes I think we forget to consider their perspective. From knowing they are continuing their soul’s journey free of the constraints of the body, free of whatever physical suffering they may have experienced.
While O’Donohue writes about loss in terms of death of someone loved, I wondered about other loss as well. Loss of innocence that comes with facing myths and outright lies in our families and in the history of our countries. Loss of the sense of self as old beliefs, patterns, habits dissolve. The loss of feeling patriotic as I come to understand that our political boundaries are meaningless to our Gaian home. The loss of trust in institutions that once seemed to have our bests interests at their core and that seemed to care. The loss of species, biodiversity, soil health. The list seems infinite.
In this time when so much of the old is dissolving – inside and out, individually and collectively – it seems important to consider how to inhabit our world, acknowledging these losses without clinging to the past while attending to what is rising and that which wants to rise. Calling forth beauty, curiosity, and love to co-create our world anew, I leave you with a bit more O’Donohue wisdom:
Beauty shines with a light from beyond itself. Love is the name of that light. At the heart of beauty must be a huge care and affection for creation, for nowhere is beauty an accidental presence. Nor is beauty simply its own end. It is not self-absorbed but points beyond itself to an embrace of belonging that holds everything together. Yet not everything is beautiful and in a broken world occasions of beauty point to possibilities of providence that lie beneath the surface fragmentation. When we endeavor to view something through the lens of beauty, it is often surprising how much more we can see.
May we look at our world through the lens of beauty. May I!
Prayful Squirrel