Grief and Place

I witness my clients chew on, struggle with, consider, reconsider, fight against, and sometimes surrender to creating a relationship with grief. This is beyond noticing grief.

Giving grief space is the next step. But to be in relationship with our grief is the transformational place–the place of knowing in our heart and in our head that we are changed by this, that we will carry this, that this cannot be undone–this grief that now lives in us.

This weekend I returned to a touchstone place for me. It is a hike with hillsides and expanses and tenuous edges and weathered Garry oak trees in the Columbia River Gorge. On this particular day, the landscape was being battered by wind and sun and the harshness of a dry September day. This spot sits at a particular curve in the Columbia River–a semi-arid steppe climate where the trees thin out, the sun seeps in, and I listen a little more closely for rattlesnakes. On top of this expanse, I take in the force of the Missoula Floods in the last ice age that gave shape to this raw drama.

Being here is coming home–a home I carved out during an implosion of my life during a time when I thought the weight of my grief would sink me. This place is the home that I sought without knowing fully why. I now know it reflected my inner state–raw and battered, and also still supporting life. The land is stunning, only perhaps upon a second or third glance. There is little shelter. The dead wildflowers crackle in the wind. There is stillness and movement. Drama and calm. Grief and possibility.

What I know now is that this place shepherded my relationship with my grief–grief for the loss of the life I thought I would have, the grief from my dad's death, and the rippling impacts and nexus of those losses. I never know how each of us will form our relationship with our grief. Yet, I do know it is essential to giving way to our lives. My hope is that you can find a place that can assist you–a place of return, a place that can reflect the shattering.

Sometimes grief needs a huge expanse for us to begin to see ourselves–and to notice how grief can and gets to be an embedded part of our lives.

#griefandplace #grief