When I am sad, as I am just now, my mind
often turns more deeply to Will, my Deptford boy, river man, and
broken love, and all that we went through together. It is a blessing
to be loved in all worlds but it is also hard to give enough time to
grief and the depth of the journey when there is a new someone to
love. I am filled with gratitude both for that love and for anything
that opens my heart a little more to the grieving, and which gives the
space for tears that feed from that deep well. More and more I see
the connections that Will made for me, with the heart of the land
that he loved and fought so hard to live on in his own way and on his
own terms, with music which is where I so often find him, and with
love itself. He taught me what meadowsweet tastes like, how to gather
and cook with comfrey and three-cornered garlic, how to live on, and
listen to, the water, find shade beneath the leaves of butterbur, how
to sit quietly with the earth, how to fight for my life. He named me 'Honeybee' and we met and
he died at Imbolc when the wild swan was flying. I taught him to see
the beauty of herons even when he was sad. That kingfishers matter. And I loved him. He was an extraordinary man and I am scarred and blessed by my
relationship with him and by his passing. I am grateful for it all. I
see how this life that we have built around us conspires to shut down
our hearts and I know more and more that that is what I must write
about; the brokenness and the mending of our disconnection with the
Land, which is our deepest love and our deepest loss. Will understood
and is in so many ways my guide. Grief keeps my heart open. Grief is the gate.
Let us honour all our beloved dead, who
take us to the edge and invite us to step through, and the beloved
living, who hold the thread of our return.
"There are those, however, that are
not frightened of grief: dropping deep into the sorrow, they find
therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When they encounter one
another, when they press their foreheads against the bark of a
centuries-old tree...their eyes well with tears that fall easily to
the ground. The soil needs this water. Grief is but a gate, and our
tears a kind of key opening a place of wonder thats been locked away.
Suddenly we notice a sustaining resonance between the drumming heart
within our chest and the pulse rising from the ground"
-David Abram
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| (Image: Kelly Louise Judd https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/swanbones) |