Love well

La Faldouet

Grief has taken me an edge of sorrow I had forgotten.

Hidden in the darkness of the subconscious, a sorrow so deep I had been able to turn my back to it.

But grief asked me to look more clearly, wouldn’t let me ignore it, avoid it, numb myself to it, as much as I tried.

Sorrow cast the shadow.

The light went out. And then it grew again.

There was a quickening, a hastening, a deeper vulnerability.

I saw a healer recently who told me all the grief is not mine, that I am carrying for my maternal line. That a sister lost a sister and cared for her children, and I too have lost sisters with children I am tender towards.

The healer did what she did and I found myself in the garden in the rain, burning letters I had written to the dead sister and to the sister who took the children under her wing. I gave them back their grief, so that I can know the grief that is mine.

There was a pause. Time. No emotion. A tinge, admittedly, as we - Em’s girls and I, my boys too - planted the medicinal garden for Em at Cobo Community Centre. There was a tinge too when her son smiled at me as I held him high, “up high, down low”.

How I long to find the high again, not be brought down with the heaviness of the gaping hole that was their mum.

I miss you Em.

This struck me when grief visited me again.

Tuesday found me in a dolmen in Jersey, La Hougue Bie, run by Jersey Heritage and aligned to Equinox sunrise. Somehow - divine intervention - I managed to secure two passes for Karl and I, and we were joined by ten others, including Peter who manages the site.

To say we were lucky is an understatement. I thought I was beyond lucky to get a sunrise at Stanydale in Shetland on the Equinox in March, but to also get a clear sunrise in Jersey in September, well I feel very blessed. The light show is incredible, the way the sun light flickers through to the back of the chamber and lights up the dolmen.

We met a Sharman who was visiting. He had lived a year in Glastonbury and knows the head gardener at Chalice Wells who I met in April. We talked for three hours in the dolmen, the three of us, and when we came to leave I felt very strange. As the morning passed, I became increasingly detached, exhausted and quiet. A skinny dip perked me up a little, but it wasn’t until we got to the Grantez dolmen and I sat inside a side chamber that the tears came.

Grief visited. My grief this time. I missed Em. I sobbed and sobbed, as I processed the emotions, and Karl held me tighter still.

We chatted for a long time after then. Because this feeling wasn’t new, it was bringing a deeper shadow into focus and I was also grieving a past long lived now.

But this is grief. It has many layers.

And like a web it weaves together many of our experiences and says “hey, you, look over here”.

It dances us to an edge and asks us to peer.

It says “get naked” here.

We don’t have a choice. Not if we hope to truly feel and heal the sorrow of the heart.

It asks only one thing: Be vulnerable again.

For this is how we arrived in the world and how we shall leave.

And I am grateful to the Sharman and the dolmen for opening something up in me.

On the Equinox itself, on Wednesday this year, we went to La Faldouet which we visited three years ago now. We have learned a lot since then, and chose this time to sit outside the dolmen, so we could watch its light show properly now, not caught in the middle of it, as we have done previously.

We were joined by a few others; the archeologist of Société Jersiaise, two women and the Sharman re-appeared, later after the sun had risen. And while there was tiredness and emotion too, there was humour at worlds colliding as they did that morning.

And there we were, all of us with our different perspectives and life experience, drawn to a dolmen on Equinox morning for a stunning sunrise which caused us all to smile.

For this is grief, a quickening and hastening to the most delicate of moments, to the fragility of life as we know it and the sorrow we feel as a humanity in what has become a chaotic and destructive world. Yet in amongst this mess, it is still a most beautiful world and there are moments like this, that give hope. I treasure these moments, for they touch a deep and vulnerable place in my heart.

I am conscious this loss I feel, is because I loved. And in amongst the sorrow and despair, the sadness and the tears, there is something else that sings a song. This is one of deeper love, of joy in simplicity, of being quieter still, feet on earth, eyes to the sky to the sun and the moon, to growing plants and using words, of holding others increasingly gently still and of loving well over and over again.

For loss is not just the absence of another, but the dying of a part of us that is no longer needed, a false role or identity played that can now be let go of into the abyss of the weight of our grief.

And when that comes to pass, and we are renewed by our release, for having danced this edge, then we open ourselves to a potential we had not realised, to a thread of light that weaves a web, that changes our life in the most beautiful and exquisite of ways.

We live with this edge, with this grief, and we live with the heart cracked open, raw and vulnerable. We are increasingly shaped by it.

And when all I said and done. When our heart is weighed, light as a feather on judgment day - if what the Egyptians say is true - then how light is our heart; did we love well?

Because truly, nothing else really matters.

Love Emma x