Halig Daeg

 

The Light and Darkness of Holidays          

 

            If we lost someone this year, the holidays are going to be traumatic. We won’t want to celebrate anything, and all the happiness being thrown around like confetti will only push us further into our dark rooms. What we want is for the holidays to be over, and we will try to ignore them as best as we can.

 

            Holidays used to be regarded as Holy Days (Old English – halig daeg), a time of centering and remembering. They offered people a chance to pause in their rushing about, look at their lives, figure out what they didn’t like about them, listen for spiritual guidance to make desired changes, and head off energized with a fresh wind in their sails. 

 

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.

 

We Light Candles

  

 

We light candles for our dead.

We light them for the grief that holds the living.

We light them to bring hope

in a dark, uncertain time.

 

Mark Liebenow

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.

 

In Darkness My Heart Breathes

I hurry through the warmth of the day to reach the night’s cool solace. In the exhalation of the tired sun over the earth’s dusty horizon, as gray shadows deepen into the long evening hours, as bright stars and planets appear in the clarity of the cobalt night air, I let go of all the chores that did not get done.

Sitting on a Dark Mountain

When grief comes, it pulls a blanket of darkness over our world. We enter a void of everything we’ve ever known and loved.

When my wife Evelyn died, I went to Yosemite and sat in the darkness of Glacier Point between the solitary lights of the constellations above and the campfires of happy people a mile below. The life I had known had abruptly ended, and I found myself in a place where there even the stars seemed unfamiliar. I tried not to think about the bears and mountain lions moving in the forest behind me.

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.

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. 

The Darkness of Grief

When grief comes, sounds go mute, the world fills with shadows, and we feel cold all the time. 

Do Not Look Away

When death comes, do not look away. 
My new poem at Rebelle Society.

http://www.rebellesociety.com/2016/03/01/markliebenow-look-away/.

Rooted in Darkness

The light of grief is rooted in darkness. My essay on this was published in Mindful Matter this week.

You can read it at: http://hlst.ee/1TrT8pA

When It Is the Darkest

When it is the darkest,

that is when people need to be reminded

that the dawn will come

and the sad times end.

Turlough O’Carolan