Broken open
I woke up today to news that reminded me how delicate human life is.
While I spent several minutes in a state of stunned disbelief, I remembered the truth of all I’ve learned over the past two years: that life doesn’t end when our bodies expire; that separation is an illusion; that we are all living in an energetic exchange of love between the seen and the unseen realms.
Nothing I’ve ever learned has proved truer than these things.
But still, we’re here to experience human life in all its messiness and with all our emotions, and grief is among the most powerful. We’re meant to experience grief, to feel it in our bones, because it’s in that pain that we are woken up and pushed to seek more.
It breaks us, yes, but it also breaks us open to the things we would never otherwise be able to see: that there is so much beauty and magic, in this world, in us, and in the things we can never truly understand as humans.
This is the gift we give each other when we pass on.
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this too, was a gift.
- Mary Oliver
