Friday, March 29for those who wander, wonder & define life on their own terms
Shadow

Melancholia-Ode to a Dead Poet

melancholia
(c) Joanna Piekart

Today is a day of considering grief and how that grief can become inconsolable, insurmountable.  I want to stand up on my desk and yell out to the world “O Captain, My Captain!  Please come back!”  But, the truth is that there is a beyond of which I know very little and from which people don’t return to this existence, even if they haven’t physically left us.  Inevitably, I have thought about and over-thought about this and have reached a crevasse, unknowably deep.  Why are some people able to quickly evaluate and adapt, move forward, pick up the pieces? This answer always eludes me despite my best efforts to understand motivations.  I choose to revel in despair sometimes because I want to know what it means to love so deeply that you don’t know how you will move on. I’m not good at catch and release.

Perhaps it would be a productive thing to learn.  There is a beauty in catch and release, getting a quick, fairy-tale glimpse of something wonderful, and then setting it free again back into the universe.  However, greater beauty to me can be found in the travails of living and being present.  Early this morning I was consumed with how to be both present and distant.  How to allow someone to live their own existence without pressure and pain, when you know that very existence could bring you to your knees.  I kept coming back to the word “sacrifice”.  Loving for the sake of loving and allowing yourself to react in whatever form is natural to you.  It’s a hard thing to do and wanting to control outcomes is standard protocol but absolutely impossible.  That’s the beauty in outcomes, and also the terror.

Perhaps it is the answer to the “why” when someone opts out.  They’re right there at that crevasse, afraid to leap across and move forward, afraid of holding others back, and instead they pick the rabbit hole.  It can seem like a viable option if you stare into it for too long.  There must be an answer hidden in the folds of our humanity of how to draw the eye up from that darkness.  Somehow, when I revel there, I am able to do it only briefly, enough to remind myself that love is complex, and renewable, and there is enough for me.  Once in my life I had to be shown the way out.  Others linger there.  Some have gone.  Good bye, Captain.  Perhaps there is peace on the other side.

Love to you all.  There is light if you only look up.

Photographs courtesy of Joanna Piekart

 

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