COMPASS This year the size of a sea Sick to its stomach. Like a page, we are only legible When opened to one another. For what is a book If not foremost a body, Waiting & wanting — Yearning to be whole, Full of itself. This book is full Of ourselves. The past is one Passionate déjà vu, One scene already seen. In history’s form, we find our own faces, Recognizable but unremembered, Familiar yet forgotten. Please. Do not ask us who we are. The hardest part of grief Is giving it a name. The pain pulls us apart, Like lips about to speak. Without language nothing can live At all, let alone Beyond itself. Lost as we feel, there is no better Compass than compassion. We find ourselves not by being The most seen, but the most seeing. We watch a toddler Freewheel through warm grass, Not fleeing, just running, the way rivers do, For it is in their unfettered nature. We smile, our whole face cleared By that single dazzling thing. How could we not be altered.

Lost as we feel, there is no better
Compass than compassion
We find ourselves not by being
The most seen, but the most seeing.

Please.
Do not ask us who we are.
The hardest part of grief
Is giving it a name.

"Good Grief

The origin of the word trauma
Is not just "wound," but "piercing" or "turning,"
As blades do when finding home.
Grief commands its own grammar,
Structured by intimacy & imagination.
We often say:
We are beside ourselves with grief.
We can't even imagine.
This means anguish can call us to envision
More than what we believed was carriable
Or even survivable.
That is to say, there does exist
A good grief.

The hurt is how we know
We are alive & awake;
It clears for us all the exquisite,
Excruciating enormities to come.
We are pierced new by the turning
Forward.

All that is grave need
Not be a burden, an anguish.
Call it instead, an anchor,
Grief grounding us in the sea.
Despair exits us the same way it enters — Turning through the mouth.
Even now conviction works
Strange magic on our tongues.
We are built up again
By what we
Build/find/see/say/remember/know.
What we carry means we survive,
It is what survives us.
We have survived us.
Where once we were alone,
Now we are beside ourselves.
Where once we were barbed & brutal as blades,
Now we can only imagine."

You don't share a language, you think, and then you realise, grief is a language. We understand each other, people with troubled pasts.

Tears are the silent language of grief

Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life's search for love and wisdom

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.

remind ourselves that grief may feel longer
and more poignant than happiness
but it still has an ending.

Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn’t mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.” Professor Neimeyer’s

don't think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains." — Anne Frank The common belief is that grief is all about pain. Anyone who has been in grief would certainly agree with that. But I believe there is more. There is love. Why do we believe that the pain we feel is about the absence of love? The love didn't die when the person we love died. It didn't disappear. It remains. The question is: How do we learn to remember that person with more love than pain? This is a question, not a mandate. I am the first to say that there is no getting around the pain. We have to go through it because it is an inevitable result of the separation we are experiencing. It's a brutal, forced separation. The word "bereaved" has its origins in the Old English words deprived of, seized, and robbed. That is how it feels when your loved one has been taken from you — as excruciating as if your arm had been ripped from your body. You've been robbed of what is dearest to you. The pain you feel is proportionate to the love you had. The deeper you loved, the deeper the pain. But you will find that love exists on the other side of the pain. It's actually the other face of pain.

Acceptance is the better part of grief.

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.