uprising

the true proportions of a waking heart

“I’m standing behind a Silver Birch tree out of the wind. It’s trying to be Spring, but the wind keeps shifting and occasionally blowing out of the North, which has quite a lot of Winter still on it.

You might be able to hear the water in the background, just running over the old mill, its an old paper mill. (Bird cawing) Who’s that? Magpie.

There’s the smell of the old and the new combined as I’m walking along, as my feet are kicking up the leaf fall from last Autumn, and there’s some fragrance coming from some of the buds that are coming out. I can’t quite identify where it’s from.

In California, the fragrance of Cedar, Pine and Juniper warming in the sun all worked like a charm, causing me to linger there a good while longer than made sense. I was caught in that game of risking ever more to recover greater and greater losses and it had played out to a perilous point.

No matter how many precautions are taken, one way or another, we will all be brought to our knees, and for many of us this will occur more than once.

It’s possible to hold this time as sacred, to honour the transitional space that opens up when we are at a total loss, when the ego fragments and the wisdom born of grief begins to emerge.

It’s a foolish thing to love a place you know you must leave, but if you didn’t risk to love it, perhaps you were never really there?”

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Grief sits on the same spectrum as love, they both ache, and occupy the same space in my chest, and it seems I cannot touch into one without disturbing the other.

When touched by loss, as grief arises within me, I send my breath down to meet it, my throat and face burn as I make contact with the uprising—a powerful sensation, shapeshifting amorphously in my chest.

I wonder what sound this feeling will make if I give it a voice. I’m surprised to find its roots reach into the deepest part of my gut, as I track its movement through my lungs, my throat and out of my mouth. The sound that emerges is primal, guttural and raw.

I am dimly aware that I hope no-one has heard, and acutely aware that I am one of a great many that have offered this voicing, part rage, part sorrow, as a statement of human fact.

When I surrender to feeling my sorrow, the fear that my head will explode when coming into contact with it is proven unfounded — confirming once again that our most vivid imaginings are not the same as the truth.

Paradoxically, in surrendering to the uncomfortable rather than trying to control it, I have the experience, the experience does not have me.

The sadness within has not diminished, but my capacity to hold it has increased, creating a space in which to stand and wonder.

I have come to believe that the pain of grief is not that of a heart broken or crushed. It is the pain of a sharp and sudden awakening to a depth of feeling that reveals the true proportion of our heart. Vast, isn’t it?

And its true proportions are difficult to experience—as is the realisation that the wake-up alarm has now been sounded. We have been brought more alive and are now bound to feel more keenly, all that there is to be felt.

It is the last, loving gift offered to us by that, or those, which we have lost.

Music by Yoav and Harry Sever