Sorrow is irrevocably paired with kindness. Perspective can be pain’s companion. Fear of what lies ahead may be mirrored by hope. What’s lost has been perennially entwined with what may be found.
Loss can be as much about transformation and adaptation as it is about dissipation. One does not ordinarily wish to lose things, but we are powerless against the sea changes wrought when the universe takes away what we have loved.
Yet love’s labours may not be lost so much as they will be reconfigured for us, and we may even learn to find beauty in the world we occupy after such loss. “At Christmas I no more desire a rose/ Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows, /But like each thing that in season grows.” (It’s an observation not remotely worthy of Shakespeare’s metaphorical finesse . . . but I confess I still crave roses in December; I have, however, come to accept that roses will no longer be coming my way.)
Mary Oliver’s Blackwater Woods captured both sides of the muddy divide:
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
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.
Love is the only thing that makes sense and, it is also senseless because it always costs everything that we are at the core of who we are and, there is no guarantee that the investment will have any kind of return…yet we must love. Wonderful post.
very nice view
wow
Beautiful. The only defence against the pain of loss is not to love in the first place but that seems a high price to pay.