Moving through the facets of my love there is no other option than grief.
The dimensionality of this heart’s breath is so vast that the inevitability of its holding cannot be corrected.
Isn’t it appropriate that I pause all movement in my lungs so that I may be within the realm in which I feel everything and nothing.
And then the pumps and the valves begin again.
*
This vessel has been changed through the duration of a child’s lifetime. My child.
I could not love her if I could not unlearn my own contempt. And unlearning happened.
Nor did I know loving me until I knew how to love her. Learning happened.
There was no way to relate to her exactitude and perfection (despite what our world of production and ability taught me) if I did not practice letting go and listening in the most simple of ways. Letting go and listening. To her. To me. To all I did not know.
*
There were never words to guide me into what I knew not. There were never words. She didn’t speak with words. And still, she spoke. She sang. She cried.
I listened.
*
What was it that led us home?
What was it?
It was the trust in her system and somehow mine. It was the arc of loving as the only way.
And it was a surrender to the moment, and beyond the moment.
It was loss and it was miraculous.
It was judgment and being judged.
It was nuance and discernment.
It was the paradox of being both the lioness and the panda.
It was a world more horizontal than vertical.
It was pain and it was relief.
It was containment that could become suffocating and simultaneously a pathway to freedom.
It was simply but not easily, what was.
*
Love and grief in the most complex of ways was what I chose to relearn in a manner of touching fractal upon fractal of everything right with nature.
All things in her majesty will die.
Of course.
Unlocking and becoming the exemption of all that does not end.
Through the stars and the seeds, birth honors death, and endings will be followed with beginnings.
*
What was it that led us home?
Love. Love as a path. Love is the path. Love is.
My grief is.