Hello Hedge Schoolers,
Tis’ nice to meet your gaze again. My weekend has been a deep journey. Medicine journeys always are, revealing the snags and blind spots that cover my landscape. The work is always work in progress.
Healing.
Remembering.
Honouring.
Calling in prayers.
For me, the word 'tend' anchored me during the transformation.
How do we tend to the relationships, places and gifts we hold so dear?
Do we nourish our bodies, souls, friends, homes, etc...with the love they so much deserve?
Tending to our places helps nourish our lives through deep gratitude. I am so grateful. Grateful for all that is good in my life. Grateful for all the pain that I have endured in my life. Grateful for the scars on bones that grief has brought.
For it has shown me how deeply I love.
Tending to grief
Love is dire. For there is always the threat of death imminent on the landscape. When that death grips us, we are swallowed in the quicksand of dark feelings. So much hurt. So much. To release hurt that cuts so deeply to the bone, leaves scars as markings of resistance. So I've been tending to these scars in the only way I know how. I've been speaking alive the memory of my journey through the writing of my first book. A book that has always been my first book.
A book of lament.
A book where words that wail, weep their way across the page as I embody the remembering. A visceral memory that Dr. Martin Shaw calls 'bone memory'.
The book title landed over the weekend as I further tended to and digested the grief that had anchored me in pain. The grief that pushed me over the 'tairseach'. Over the threshold.
So "A-light in the lament: Poetic flowers amidst the scars" will be coming soon.
The tending to these scars also brought alive a desire to help others speak alive their grief. Brought alive the desire to hold space for the remembering and honouring of a life that has meant so much.
Death as social leprosy
When we first meet the deluge of pain that is death, we find our breath too shallow to speak. Words are hollow in the face of grief. Tears are the only language that speaks through us. During this initial phase, all around us ask how we are doing. We are showered in offers of help and support but are too fragile to even contemplate any forward steps.
But as the seasons of time move over our landscape, we begin to feel the urge. The urge to hold on through story. The urge to speak through the darkness in search of light.
But too often, we find the help and support have faded. This is not a judgment but a reality.
Life continues moving.
Speaking about death can often feel like a form of social leprosy. When I was finally able to utter the words that my younger brother had died in a car accident without crying, I wanted desperately to speak his memory alive. But the ears I yearned for were not always ready to hold that space.
And that is ok.
To those who have lost someone, you will know the yearn. As you feel the grip of your memories slip over the years, you desperately want to speak. To speak alive the pain that helps with the healing. Oral recounts keep alive with breath the memory of those we love and miss dearly. Words as whispers drenched in tears help release the trauma. A trauma that at times threatens to swallow us whole.
So let us take those steps together.
Let us be willing to fully hold the grief, for it is love in another form. Let us be willing to tend to our own souls by crying tears that nourish the soil. By laughter that makes the birds sing. By holding in embrace those that need the press of their heart on yours.
For it, all comes back to love.
Tend to that love. Without the story of victimhood. For that is a dicey tightrope to walk. Tend to that love without inebriation of vice. Tend to that love with nourishing love that brings back to life the flowers of our soul.
New flowers. New light.
A light in the lament.
Gone from this form but forever formless with us.
To those who have loved and lost, I see you in all your splendour. And I hold space for you in my heart and soul to speak alive the love grief that has etched on your bones.
I would love to hear from you.
From my tending heart to yours,
Steve
A-light in the lament: Poetic flowers amidst the scars