In so many ways, loss shows us what is precious, while love teaches us who we are.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler, Life Lessons
If I were to count the clouds in my photograph above, there would be one for every loss and love I’ve let go of since I wrote my last post on Earth: Sacred/Possession.
Two, no three, cats if I count the stray who briefly brought such joy to my home tho I didn’t know she had come here to pass away in a warm bed on a January night. My beloved remaining dog of my littermate set, at the ancient age of 16 even tho her brother had left us at the good age of 13. I was humbled by her love and her lessons to me. Two parents, divorced over 40 years but passed away within a few months of each other, as if they were still in a race to be first to the best of the finish line. Another dear friend, who healed my broken heart with such care, decided at age 94 he’d had enough and was gone in a poof of letting go in a matter of just a few days. A hope for a new life abroad, two daughters not only through undergraduate education but now nearly finished second masters in vocal performance, the loss of my being an anchor in their lives and now a visitor. A family cabin where I learned to love Nature and wildness and built alters of flowers and rocks to give thanks for the beauty, tho I was only 6 or 7 or 8. It just seemed natural to do that in the setting sun of what seemed huge mountain, but as I drove there daily to care for a mother who barely recognized me through her illness, it was just a small field, while she herself was “losing her mind” as she oft marveled. Yes she was, till she had returned to childhood and then left altogether. The list goes on. And on.
Sooo much leaving.
All this to badly explain such a gap in my writing about Earth whether sacred or possession.
But I realize in doing so finally that what we’ve lost, too, of our Earth habitat in 6 years is truly stunning.
Whether through hurricanes with new measures they are so large, or tornadoes that are beyond what was previously know, heat that sears us and reaches 135 degrees with alarming regularity, vast clearings of Amazonian forest, or ice caps that seemed they could never disappear, or a lethal virus that is invisible in our air, unseen but Lordy, what an illness —and too often death — it brings to us, these are all signs we’re losing our “temperate” home. And quickly it feels.
We’ve lost our sense of safety.
We’ve lost our sense of belonging perhaps.
And I don’t think it’s just me that is in a state of grief for these things we’ve lost or know we are losing as we hope not to see or feel what our survival instinct alerts us to. For in the loss of a “temperate” nature, we also lose our dreams. Some of us lose our dreams of a cabin on a creek. Our children are losing their dreams of a hospitable quality of life as they experienced the weather. For all of us we are losing a future as we envisioned it.
I’ve been learning a lot about grief these years obviously. It cascades and overwhelms or it pokes at odd times followed by a deep breath and a look at a blue sky. It darkens days and lights up nights with the starbursts of tossing and not often enough the tears to wash it away. Because there is no away. There is only the awareness of what feels lost. And time feels infinite in these moments of realizing what is precious but is no more. For we are bound still in love with it.
Sooo in love.
Tonight there were cries outside. A young hawk has been gracing this urban racetrack where I live, stopping briefly in my trees the past few sunsets. These were cries of working to live. A fledger flying and figuring out the hows of life. A few hours later I was brought out into the night by chrrrs — very small owls, perhaps three of them — in the same trees, calling to each other. I had no idea where their mother was but obviously near by and they seeming to reassure each other of nearness in the adventure of this night with their cries.
Crying is not always a bad thing, I’m reminded. It is a sound of being alive.
Nature so wants to live.
The news notes regarding increases in wildlife seeming to live better when we humans took to our hiding places inside these past few months made clear to me what possession really means:
Our temperate world is to be shared and we are too often oblivious of the life getting out of our way. It has no place, we feel, in “our landscape”. Yet what other habitat is there for all the “others” we identify as not being our relations in stardust and life force?
With all the losses I see and feel, experience and intuit, I’m learning very slowly, it truly is only love that remains.
With the grief comes the love, like rain on a hot day, or stars poking out at night.
With losses comes the recognition of what we find precious.
May we see how precious this earth is, and in our grief may we find ways to love it into better sustaining all the lives and places and time(s) we love.
*Please see www.edmontaigne-author.com for information on my new book on learning to communicate from my dogs: “Training Two: Learning the Language of Love …”. There’s a blog there too. It’s also available on Amazon: Training Two: Learning the Language of Love from Two Dogs Who Share One Brain