I began writing this post during our summer holiday on the narrowboat Polyphony..,somewhere that travelling light is almost irrelevant, as there's so much of home already waiting aboard - though this time round we did travel with a poorly chicken, which put a somewhat comic gloss on the whole thing.
Leaving things behind is always a big deal for me - and I've learned that when you travel, the heaviest things are often those you don't take with you - the people you leave when it's time to move on, the beloved pets who simply wouldn't enjoy sharing a family holiday but whose absence is felt like a small, heavy lump weighing on your heart.
Sometimes those things you leave become so heavy that you can't actually keep going - and then you realise that there's a whole work of letting go still to be done
The wonderful Anne Lamott, whose presence at this year's Greenbelt was a lifetime highlight, says of letting go "Everything I have ever let go of has claw marks on it" - and that's so true for me.
Things and people - the things of home, the people of your community - can be both an anchor, offering stability and certainty
("Your firmnesse draws my circle just, And makes me end where I begunne") and a dead weight which might just drag you down til you sink without trace beneath waves of grief and desolation.
That is so much part of the process of bereavement. If a "good death" is about letting go of unfinished business, trusting that somehow (by God's grace, on a good day) those you love will be OK without you, even though the thought of being without them is a pain so huge that it would rob the sun itself of warmth and light...If that is what a good death means - handing oneself, ones work,ones relationships into untiring, ever-open arms...then a good bereavement must involve a complementary letting go as well...
Because, on this life journey we both carry and are carried by other people..Through the death of my parents, I have been, and will probably be again, the precious burden that others have laid down...I've experienced the way in which our relationship cannot be unchanged by their departure (though I firmly believe that love itself is not changed by death, for the dead or for the living)
I've known the sadness that comes from being left behind, the way that absence seems to be for a time a bigger reality than presence had ever been...and I have learned to gradually build a cairn, turning the dead-weight of grief into a tower of precious memories, a land mark that changes the sky-line of my life, something by which to regain my bearings not once, but again and again.
I don't yet know how the final leave-taking will be...though there are, I guess, faint echoes in the process of leaving a parish, of moving from a space at the centre to one totally outside, seeing the tide come in and wash away any sign of those castles you built so assiduously, with so much energy and hope.
Of course you're not forgotten, but the space that you left is rightly filled by others, and a new normal quickly becomes just the way things are.
That's not altogether comfortable to the ego - we often imagine that it might be good to feel indispensible - but it's certainly the way things should be.
At my best, I want those I love to travel light too...
No claw marks!
Leaving things behind is always a big deal for me - and I've learned that when you travel, the heaviest things are often those you don't take with you - the people you leave when it's time to move on, the beloved pets who simply wouldn't enjoy sharing a family holiday but whose absence is felt like a small, heavy lump weighing on your heart.
Sometimes those things you leave become so heavy that you can't actually keep going - and then you realise that there's a whole work of letting go still to be done
The wonderful Anne Lamott, whose presence at this year's Greenbelt was a lifetime highlight, says of letting go "Everything I have ever let go of has claw marks on it" - and that's so true for me.
Things and people - the things of home, the people of your community - can be both an anchor, offering stability and certainty
("Your firmnesse draws my circle just, And makes me end where I begunne") and a dead weight which might just drag you down til you sink without trace beneath waves of grief and desolation.
That is so much part of the process of bereavement. If a "good death" is about letting go of unfinished business, trusting that somehow (by God's grace, on a good day) those you love will be OK without you, even though the thought of being without them is a pain so huge that it would rob the sun itself of warmth and light...If that is what a good death means - handing oneself, ones work,ones relationships into untiring, ever-open arms...then a good bereavement must involve a complementary letting go as well...
Because, on this life journey we both carry and are carried by other people..Through the death of my parents, I have been, and will probably be again, the precious burden that others have laid down...I've experienced the way in which our relationship cannot be unchanged by their departure (though I firmly believe that love itself is not changed by death, for the dead or for the living)
I've known the sadness that comes from being left behind, the way that absence seems to be for a time a bigger reality than presence had ever been...and I have learned to gradually build a cairn, turning the dead-weight of grief into a tower of precious memories, a land mark that changes the sky-line of my life, something by which to regain my bearings not once, but again and again.
I don't yet know how the final leave-taking will be...though there are, I guess, faint echoes in the process of leaving a parish, of moving from a space at the centre to one totally outside, seeing the tide come in and wash away any sign of those castles you built so assiduously, with so much energy and hope.
Of course you're not forgotten, but the space that you left is rightly filled by others, and a new normal quickly becomes just the way things are.
That's not altogether comfortable to the ego - we often imagine that it might be good to feel indispensible - but it's certainly the way things should be.
At my best, I want those I love to travel light too...
No claw marks!
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