"We cannot escape these times; we cannot outrun what is intimately entangled in our moment-to-moment world. It is now that our apprenticeship [to grief] is most called upon. We are asked to stand alongside these difficult and painful visitations, these epiphanies of lamentation.”

- Francis Weller

What a thing, this being human. We are guaranteed so little—only an end, but even that, at some unknowable time & place—& the loss of other things to which we’ve opened our hearts.

It is a distinctly modern sickness to deny these realities & avoid feeling the alchemical power of the losses that grace our lives. We lose so much: innocence, opportunities, visions, capacities, humans, animals, skillsets, expected futures. And by denying the truth of this, we fail to wake up to the reality that each loss contains a magical kernel of lifeforce, tailor-made for our individual becoming.

Loss is the forge, grief the…