Grief is a Shameless Dreamer

excerpt from The Smell of Rain on Dust

If I could excerpt this entire book, The Smell of Rain on Dust, I would. My copy is earmarked on nearly every page. But for the time being, I want to share this introduction with you, about Grief and Praise, as so beautifully offered by poet and great wisdomkeeper, Martín Prechtel:

Grief is what living beings experience when what or whom they love dies or disappears.

Grief is not what people feel when they lose what they want, or lose what they want to happen, or when they don’t get what they think they deserve. This is only disappointment. Not the same at all (very imprtant not to confuse with grief).

• Grief is natural; to grieve the loss of what we love is as natural as peeing, eating, singing, dreaming, running, or looking under rocks for bugs to feed your frog.

• More importantly, grieving is necessary: when there is real loss, grieving should never be avoided or postponed; grieving is absolutely necessary. Without grief the world would cease to renew itself; the world would cease to exist.

• Grief is not a preference, for choosing to not have grief when grief is there is to defer and burden someone else with having to do your grieving. This makes the world a sick place.

• Grief is an obligation to the life one has been awarded, an obligation to life to make more life.

• To truly and freely grieve as an entire people can revive an entire culture just as much as it can bring back to life an individual.

• This necessity of active grieving when there is the deep loss of what we love can be done in many ways; it can make many forms, but is lost when it is simply a theatrical act, choreographed to mimic grief.

• Grief permeates life and grieving can take many forms, but grief can never be outrun or simply thought away, transcended or meditated into nonexistence. Necessary grief when shunned or unattended can easily hide for years, even generations, in the skeletal structure of the family collective psyche. Like light, matter, sound, and energy, grief will eventually manifest even among those in the future who did not consciously experience the loss.

• So, best to grieve when it’s time, to save the world a lot of war and trouble.

• Grieving is a sacred art, not an art whose products should be sold or seen objectively. Grieving is an art that when it is fully known and made to actively happen in all its grandeur and integrity, is the backbone of all real peace. It is the art of all arts; it is the art behind all real art.

• Grief is not sorrow, though there are certainly stages of grieving that are sorrow-filled. Real grieving refuses to remain in sorrow.

• Grief is a phenomenon that must be purposely done, for grieving needs time and motion to allow the medicine of grief’s dream to fully blossom into new life to fill the loss.

• Grief is active.

• Grief is movement, not stagnation; real grieving never wallows.

• Only nations capable of the true art of grief, grieving their mistakes and the deeply felt losses they have endured or have caused to happen, can say that they are not pools of emotional stagnation dressed up in the spoils of ungrieved wars disguised as good business, heaping their unwept tears upon the poor and struggling as the currency of poverty.

• Grief has a sound, a sound that embarrasses the repressed and offends the oppressive; grief is the sound of being alive.

• Grief is not depression; a griever is not depressed. Depression comes from not being able to grieve, which converts our losses into violence.

• Grief is a shameless dreamer who thinks nothing of healing impossible despair head-on, of reionizing impossible situations, of healing impossible sickness, of depolarizing impossible hardheaded people. Grief thinks nothing of impossibility, only of what makes life more deliciously alive.

• Grief doesn’t care if he’s badly misunderstood, underestimated or forgotten: he’s not hurt because people run away when they see him coming, because grief has one real good friend.

• Grief is the best friend of Praise, because Praise is a grandiose griever!

• Without both Grief and Praise, life is only hate and mediocrity.

• Grief and Praise are renters whose landlord is Love.

• Because they are best friends, both Grief and Praise live together in the same building, but in opposing quarters: in the left and right chambers of Love’s great thumping house called the Heart.

• Together both Grief and Praise work hard to print their own money which they use to pay their rent to Love, for theirs is a common currency of life’s great beauty.

• Praise also has a sound, that always moves and motivates but never ends. One can only catch up within earshot of Praise’s sound or pull away, but Praise of life never ends.

• Grief is a worker on life’s big highways, and Praise is Grief’s eternal freight train, forever hauling the vision of life’s bigger picture from stars whose light hasn’t got here yet, which Grief uses to refill the potholes of our losses.

• Praise is Grief’s voice and neither ever disappears, because they are the sound of all parts of the world and universe, each living according to its own nature, each entire in itself, each a willing participle in the great prayer of praise singing the world back to life.

artwork by Martin Prechtel, featured in his book The Smell of Rain on Dust, chapter: Paddles of Tears, Canoes Made of Old Songs

May this be of benefit to you and yours. I have been late in posting here because I have been deep in my own grieving and transformation, as our family pulls up our stakes and sets sail for another country.

So much love,
Leah