Tag: loss

faith, life lessons, love

At the end of the day…

mimijk

Hi my friend,

How have the days been treating you? Are you able to relish the change in seasons – wherever you may be? I hope at the very least, you grab the opportunity to find your moment; if there is more than one, all the better.

It’s been a tough time here at Camp K – the losses of three very important relatives have passed away, rocking everyone more than a little bit. This isn’t about the loss, on the contrary, it’s more about what I found.

The moments in between – that’s all there really is, and we experience them all the time. We just shake our heads and say “oh that…”. When my nieces remember their dad – the stories are about little things – how he made up stories about elves while getting them ready for school; his attendance at every soccer game; his words of encouragement when things looked really awful. The stories seemed endless. And each adult child referenced the most innocent of moments. The kind you forget or minimize or dismiss.

I was speaking with my son the other day and he too was saying that the takeaways could be very conflicted and difficult, yet he too is considering the happier moments – not to canonize, nor vilify – just holding the small moments that appear far larger and comforting in the rear view mirror. The ones that can be overlooked yet show up as the most seminal of moments. How fortunate that in our deep recesses, we too can remember – and find solace in the little stories, far more than the epic ones.

One of David Kanigan’s posts last week spoke far more eloquently about the now, the beauty of capturing one moment in time and holding it close and holding it tenderly. Sitting with the experiences you probably didn’t even realize had primary placement in your mind. Didn’t realize until you needed to call upon them for comfort and love.

I leave you with words from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929)

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Live everything my dear friend – live it all, and rest assured what remains is love.

anxiety, friendship, life lessons, love, mindfulness, parenting

When The Heart Just Hurts

mimijk

“Life will break you.  Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.  You have to love.  You have to feel.  It is the reason you are here on earth.  You are here to risk your heart.  You are here to be swallowed up.  And when it happens that you are broken or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit under an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps wasting their sweetness.  Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”   — Louise Erdrich

th

I  had different plans for this post – we attended my daughter-in-law’s graduation yesterday, the day before was a banner day at the barn.  I can’t get there right now.  My heart returns to the unfathomable shock of yesterday’s disaster in Newtown.  I can’t turn away for to do so would diminish the feeling of being inconsolable.  I pray that these families tasted abundant sweetness and that they are enveloped in love and support.  My tears drip on the keyboard – I can’t write about the loss of life itself…one can plan I suppose, though arguably it is better to hope.