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THE DAKINI SPEAKS
by Joyce Wellwood My friends, let's grow up. Let's stop pretending we don't know the deal here. Or if we truly haven't noticed, let's wake up and notice. Look: Everything that can be lost, will be lost. It's simple - how could we have missed it for so long? Let's grieve our losses fully, like human ripe beings. But please, let's not be so shocked by them. Let's not act so betrayed, As though life had broken her secret promise to us. Impermanence is life's only promise to us, And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability. To a child, she seems cruel, but she is only wild, And her compassion exquisitely precise. Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth, She strips away the unreal to show us the real. This is the true ride - let's give ourselves to it! Let's stop making deals for a safe passage - There isn't one anyway, and the cost is too high. We are not children anymore. The true human adult gives everything for what cannot be lost. Let's dance the wild dance of no hope. IF YOU KNEW
by Ellen Bass What if you knew you’d be the last to touch someone? If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theater, tearing them, giving back the ragged stubs, you might take care to touch that palm, brush your fingertips along the life line’s crease. When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase too slowly through the airport, when the car in front of me doesn’t signal, when the clerk at the pharmacy won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember they’re going to die. A friend told me she’d been with her aunt. They’d just had lunch and the waiter, a young gay man with plum black eyes, joked as he served the coffee, kissed her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left. Then they walked half a block and her aunt dropped dead on the sidewalk. How close does the dragon’s spume have to come? How wide does the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time? THE UNBROKEN
by Rashani There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken, a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable. There is a sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy and a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength. There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being. There is a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges cut the heart as we break open to the place inside which is unbreakable and whole, while learning to sing. ALLOW
By Danna Faulds There is no controlling life. Try corralling a lightning bolt, containing a tornado. Dam a stream and it will create a new channel. Resist, and the tide will sweep you off your feet. Allow, and grace will carry you to higher ground. The only safety lies in letting it all in – the wild and the weak; fear, fantasies, failures and success. When loss rips off the doors of the heart, or sadness veils your vision with despair, practice becomes simply bearing the truth. In the choice to let go of your known way of being, the whole world is revealed to your new eyes. |
LOVE AFTER LOVE
by Derek Walcott The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. A POEM ON GRIEF
by John O'Donohue When you lose someone you love, Your life becomes strange, The ground beneath you becomes fragile, Your thoughts make your eyes unsure; And some dead echo drags your voice down Where words have no confidence Your heart has grown heavy with loss; And though this loss has wounded others too, No one knows what has been taken from you When the silence of absence deepens. Flickers of guilt kindle regret For all that was left unsaid or undone. There are days when you wake up happy; Again inside the fullness of life, Until the moment breaks And you are thrown back Onto the black tide of loss. Days when you have your heart back, You are able to function well Until in the middle of work or encounter, Suddenly with no warning, You are ambushed by grief. It becomes hard to trust yourself. All you can depend on now is that Sorrow will remain faithful to itself. More than you, it knows its way And will find the right time To pull and pull the rope of grief Until that coiled hill of tears Has reduced to its last drop. Gradually, you will learn acquaintance With the invisible form of your departed; And when the work of grief is done, The wound of loss will heal And you will have learned To wean your eyes From that gap in the air And be able to enter the hearth In your soul where your loved one Has awaited your return All the time. THE HOURS
by Rainer Maria Rilke I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood. Then the knowing comes: I can open to another life that's wide and timeless. So I am sometimes like a tree rustling over a gravesite and making real the dream of the one its living roots embrace: a dream once lost among sorrows and songs. |
QUOTES
"There is no house like the house of belonging."
by David Whyte
"And when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid so it is better to speak knowing we were never meant to survive."
by Audre Lorde
"Once we accept that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, we can live wonderfully side by side. As long as we succeed in loving the distances between one another, each of us can see each other as whole against the sky."
by Rainer Marie Rilke
"Sometimes it takes a great sky to find that first, bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart. Sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out someone has written something new in the ashes of your life."
by David Whyte
"Freedom. It isn't once to walk out under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark - freedom is daily, prose-bound routine remembering. Putting together, inch by inch the starry worlds. From all the lost collections."
by Adrienne Rich
"We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure but not delight, not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world."
by Jack Gilbert
"To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."
by Mary Oliver
"He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise."
by William Blake
Stace Dubin
MA Counseling Psychology
Marriage and Family Therapist #89464
415.364.3070 stacedubin@gmail.com
