Griefy December Giving Cracks Where the Light Get In ✨
Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.
by Gabriell Calvocoressi
Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton.
Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.
Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.
Like you used to make me when you were alive.
Love to feed you. Sit over steaming
bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes
covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you.
Would love to walk to the post office with you.
Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall
and you can tell me about the after.
Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.
Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know
you. I know you will know me even though. I’m
bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden.
I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you
want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you
standing looking out at the river with your rake
in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket.
They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one
if you’ll only come by. Know I told you
it was okay to go. Know I told you
it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?
You always believed me. Wish you would
come back so we could talk about truth.
Miss you. Wish you would walk through my
door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through
the pipes.
The grief of this time of years always sits on me, like an immovable rock, one I can't quite lift off my body as I walk through the world. ‘It’s the most wonderful time of the year', the mantra of December, grates - in stark contrast to the short, dark days in the Northern hemisphere. It's not that I'm a grinch, as my mother said to me on the phone last week: ‘You love Christmas, don’t you?' And I do. I love cooking for it, I love giving gifts, I love that I have children in my life now that I get to shower with presents. I love the ceremony around it and the festivities. I even love Christmas carols.
But I contain multitudes, as do you, and it always feels a bit grief-y around this time, too. I've most certainly written about this before in this newsletter but in Traditional Chinese Medicine late Autumn is associated with grief and sorrow - held in the lungs. It makes sense: we hold in so much emotion in our chest, we forget to breathe deeply, often anxiousness, sadness, tears rise up. We spend the first parts of the year running towards our goals and by the end, after all that chasing, we realise how much rest we need - how much retreat. Luckily, the darkness and the slow-down remind us of that and we have an opportunity to go inward.
The poem above speaks so deeply to the grief I've felt missing people who I've lost, or simply haven't seen for a long while. But it also speaks to the grief we all feel for how life changes, inevitably, over time. The rhythms and routines we once had will transform over and over in our lives - no matter how much we may fight it. The idea for me, both as practitioner and teacher, is to find a way to dance with the grief without allowing it to consume me. The challenge, then, is to actually feel it. To sit with it. And then witness it changing, the focus shift, the joy seep in, too. Like old bud Leonard Cohen said ‘Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.' When we grieve our losses, it always transforms into something new - even if the process of grieving itself is painful.
Today I'm teaching a short class on IG live at 12 pm / 9 am PST / 5 pm GMT. I hope to see some of you there. If you can't make it live it will be on my IGTV after the fact. I'm also launching my Patreon New Year's Eve - there will be four tiers: Community Supporter for $5, A True Bud for $9, A Real One for $29 and Friendly Friend for $49. I'll announce what will be included at each level in next week's newsletter. There will be a mix of in-person and recorded elements for membership and above-all it will be accessible with lots included at every price point.