Given the public holiday on the day I usually write these blogs, I thought I would post today a beautiful passage of prose from the book “How to carry what can’t be fixed” by Megan Devine.
This is a wonderful book that I highly recommend to someone struggling with grief. The book contains wonderful information and sharing on the difficulties of grief and some beautiful and helpful reflections/worksheet you may find helpful to do.
For today, here is a beautiful passage from the book.
We come to ourselves in softening, in tenderness, to become available to pain and to love. To make our hearts available. Yield, don’t fight. All is not well, and here we are with that. So we show up as tenderly as we can. Show up with tenderness for what is, softening into it. Yield.
Grief does not show you that you’ve lost your way. Grief is the way. Softening your heart is a radical act. Wanting for yourself something beautiful and gently and kind. Holding out your hands to see what comes. Holding out your heart as a place for meeting what has already come.
What is here now is love: it’s not here to make it better, not here to make grief go away, hot here to give you a reason. It’s just here.
And love sits beside you now, even when you don’t feel it, even when it seems to have disappeared from sight. Maybe love is still here with you in whatever form it can take: a love that goes beneath everything. It makes no sense. I don’t think it tries to. But there is love beneath and around and within everything.
And maybe this love knew, maybe love was there preparing you as best it could for what was to come, for what is now. maybe you have been companioned all along, through this whole life, by love in all its forms, and at all times.
As you breathe into this space, you feel a gentleness come into you now, rising up to meet you, surrounding your heart, holding your hands. Infinite love. Infinite tenderness.
Love is with you here. A love that is heartbroken for you, as much as it is heartbroken with you. Beside you, exactly here. And you breathe in all the love that’s available. All the gentleness. Meeting pain with love, we open into love.
And we come back again and again, making that choice to be present, to feel it, to receive even this – even this. All is not well, and here you are with that.
What began in love continues here along this road, on this path here.
May you know love.
May you know kindness.
May you be free from suffering.And may you have hope in the continual, continuing experiment: to believe in a love that doesn’t save you, but is still your shelter and still your home.
May what you’ve found in this book help you carry what is yours to live.