The Woods at Dusk

 (I posted this last year. I still like it.)

It’s late December and the woods are quiet. 

I stand in my backyard lost in the mystery of trees. Two squirrels chase each other through the snow and deepening shadows. I listen to trees creak in the breeze, and hear the soft click-click-click of empty sunflower shells land on each other, dropped by wrens and finches at the feeder. The magenta of sunset flows across the sky, then shifts to rose. 

The Braided River

“Rivulets of love run through the canyons of my heart, 

along with streams of grief.

They intertwine and flow together with the hours 

            through thunderstorms and warm days,

            under full moons and new,

and nourish the green meadows.

Nature’s River of Life flows down through the solitude

of ancient mountains, 

with tributaries that join in from the sides

that bear compassion, humility, hope. 

The creeks and streams are braided into One River

and flow to others when they are needed.

There are many streams but one river.”

 

                                                Mark Liebenow

 

Earth Day, April 22—the legacy of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin.

Today

 

It’s about this day. It has always been about this day. It’s what we do today that matters. If we do nothing new today, then yesterday, and all the holy days that came before it, amount to nothing. If we do not go through this day with “love, compassion, and empathy for others,” as my friend Sasha says, then what have we learned?

Tabasco Night

 It’s Tabasco Night for two dozen people. You don’t know them, but you know enough about grief that you could walk up to any of them and share what’s percolating underneath or tearing you apart. They would listen, because they are that kind of people.

Come to the Table

            We come to the table where every suffering heart has a place. We share our stories of being shattered and lost, and talk of the stillness of our days and the erosion of dreams in the long drift of night. We weep by the rivers of Babylon as we remember our dead and the terrible, sad beauty of love.

We come to the table to nourish one another. We have had our fill of struggle and despair. We share what we have with each other, and pass faith from hand to hand. In holy giving and receiving, we bear witness to the communion of sacrifice and grace.

 

We come to the table to say to each other that in the midst of despair there is hope. That where we are broken, there is mending. That where we are angry, there is reconciliation. We come in compassion to bring courage to each other for the challenges that lie ahead, and to learn how to live in community together. 

 

                                                            Mark Liebenow, Christmas 2021

Boxes of Imagined Grief

 My friends didn’t know what to say to me because Ev died young and unexpectedly. No one had taught my generation about grief, not what to say or do or expect. No one knew to tell me that life was over as I had known it, or that I would be thrown into a land cratered by death for more than a year.

 

Yet everyone had a Box of Imaginary Grief, even if they had never lost anyone close, filled with odds and ends of what they thought sorrow might be like. Whenever I came over, they dug around in their box, took out something braided with hope, and handed it to me to comfort my grief. Then they expected the dinner party to go on as planned. As you might have guessed, this wasn’t what I needed. 

 

Madonnas

 A couple of years ago, my essay “Madonnas” was published by The Manifest-Station. You can read it at http://themanifeststation.net/2015/01/06/madonnas/ Some of the words here come from that essay.

 

            *

 

I’m mindful of Mary today, the Jewish madonna, because January 6 is the celebration of Epiphany that commemorates when Mary welcomed the three wisdom teachers of the East. Because of their gifts for baby Jesus, she began to understand the nature of her future grief.

 

I’m also thinking of the unheralded compassion of mothers and grandmothers throughout the centuries who have taken on suffering in order to help the abused, the hungry, the poor, the disenfranchised, the widowed and the lonely. They brought healing to people from the body of the earth, and brought the spirituality and wisdom of the body and the heart into their communities of faith. 

Winter Prayer

 (I posted this earlier this year, but it’s still timely and needed. Photo taken by Marcia.)

 

 

Winter Prayer

 

 

In the turning of the natural world back towards light, may we so turn.

 

May we be grateful for what we have. 

and mindful of the widowed, the sick, the refugee, the battered, the abandoned. 

May we realize when we have enough and share the rest.

 

May we take risks and love without expecting anything in return. 

May we respond to others with compassion instead of judgment. 

May we sit with those who are hurting or lonely and be present.

 

Chairs

Christiana Rasmussen wrote about chairs in her grief post last week. I imagine she will say something more about it this week, but I’m also going to run with the image. You can read her posts at www.secondfirsts.com.

She also interviewed me for her Dear Life podcast via Zoom. She was sitting at home in her chair while I was at home in mine, and it felt like we were in the same place, sharing our experiences of grief over a table. It’s rare to find someone who understands everything you are saying about grief without having to explain.

 

Getting Personal with Grief

How we think about grief depends upon whether we’ve lost someone close, and lived inside the Theatre of the Absurd for a time, or we’re still standing on the street trying to look cool, wanting, not wanting, to peek in.

 

We can observe someone hunched over, sobbing with emotion, hands clenching and unclenching, face wet with tears, and know how grief looks and sounds.

 

We can classify grief as a species, study its genetics and genomes, and observe how it interweaves with other species like anger, despair, love, guilt, loneliness, rage, depression, saudade, and hope.

 

Death of a Hawk

The Great Black Hawk saga.

A short essay of mine about a rare hawk was published by Entropy Magazine today. It’s also about curiosity, death, grief, compassion, wilderness, healing, kinship with nature, ecological warning, hope, and what it means to live in community with the earth. 

I worry about what I would have done if I hadn’t had nature in the months after Evelyn’s death. I often went to Yosemite to hike alone in the wilderness because I needed to figure out how I was going to survive grief. The long days on the trail gave me the time and the solitude I needed to listen for what I could not hear at home. The beauty and awe of natural world reminded me that I was not alone, and that I always had a place where I could go and renew my spirit.

You can read the essay online:

https://entropymag.org/the-birds-the-great-black-hawk/

(Yes, that's an owl in the photo because I don't have my own photo of a hawk, but the journal has a good one.)

Prayer For Dark Times

Prayer for Dark Times

In this dark time, as flowers rise from the earth towards the light, may we so rise.

May we be grateful for what we have, and mindful of the refugee, the battered, 

the widowed, the sick, the abandoned. 

May we realize when we have enough and share the rest.

We All Should Know What to Do

Everyone who grieves has had trusted friends who disappeared because they didn't know what to say or do for someone who is grieving, and they didn't want to say the wrong thing. Or they were uneasy around unpredictable emotions. Or they didn't want to feel helpless in helping someone stop crying. Or they hadn't worked through losing someone close to them in the past. Or they’re not good with emotions. Or they were scared.

There are many reasons not to take the risk. But they fall short when you care about someone.

Everyone should know what to do and say by now. This information is available on the Internet. There are grief memoirs they can read to help them understand the basics of every kind of loss—spouse, child, parent, sibling—cancer, heart attack, stillbirth, accident—(although still not so many are being written by men). 

If they care about someone  people need to trust their compassion to guide them​. They won't be able to take someone’s grief or pain away, but they can sit and listen to someone so that they don’t feel so alone.

My new essay about this is at Rebelle Society, where I talk about the reaction that Christina Rasmussen received when she told someone that her work was helping people with grief: http://www.rebellesociety.com/2020/01/06/markliebenow-grief/

What You Can Say and Do

The CBS Sunday morning program this week ran a feature on grief that included an interview with Rebecca Soffer of Modern Loss, a website that shares personal stories of loss. One of the points brought up was that many people who want to help those who are grieving feel uneasy about saying anything because they don’t want to make the grieving feel worse. 

Below are a few suggestions for what you can say and do. I am grateful to Modern Loss for publishing several of my short essays on grief. You can find the links below.

Rumi's Stretcher from Grace

            Last night I was wandering around the house, which is something I do now and then to get my bearings, when a line from Rumi’s “Zero Circle” came to mind: “Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up.” I don’t think Rumi was addressing grief, but his words have useful insights. 

 

            The poem starts: “Be helpless, dumbfounded, / Unable to say yes or no.” This pretty much sums up our state of mind when grief begins. We no longer know what to think or feel, and find it hard to make even simple decisions.

 

Love is a River

Love is a river. It doesn’t exist when it’s not flowing. 

When grief comes, love moves from being a noun to being a verb.

Love is the awareness of being.

Dark World Community

Since Evelyn’s death, I often go to Yosemite. In the darkness of night, I walk into the meadow and lose myself in the wonder of the constellations turning overhead. 

Talking to Trees

When a friend received bad news about her cancer, I thought, “I’ll go out and talk to the trees.”

Bear with me a moment. I used to light candles, think of those who needed support, and prayed. I sometimes still do, but talking to the trees seemed to be the right thing to do here.

Bitterness or Compassion

Bitterness is a bale of barbed wire. After someone we love dies, we wrap it around ourselves to protect us from ever being hurt again. Life can’t get in, but we also can’t get out. 

Bitterness has razor sharp edges. At a time when we aren’t able to feel anything else, we can feel this. Bitterness is different than sorrow. 

Bitterness is sorrow covered with the jalapeno of anger and the habanero of rage.

Comfort in a Time of Grief

You know how it is when you suffer a tragedy and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and are happy again in no time at all? Neither do I.

When we’re deep in grief, there’s not much we can do to get out of it. There’s little that anyone can say that softens the impact of our loved one’s death. When we’ve moved further on in grief, we’re more understanding, but it will never be all right that our loved one died.