To love life

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you've held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you down like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile,

no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.

Ellen Bass

These words so powerfully speak to my heart and mind in these days.

To see and hold pain and grief in life and the world, and to tenderly, courageously choose to love life has been my true north.

This last year I have held space for darkness and deep grief, excruciating suffering and and awareness of a world I have had no stomach for. I have at times wondered in awe, how can a body withstand this? And yet the human spirit reminds me again and again of it's resilience when there is empathic witness, connection, compassion and trust in the unfolding.

Individual trauma, collective trauma, inter generational trauma, betrayals and broken hearts, imprints of fear and collapse in bodies and minds, how does a body withstand this?

Francis Weller calls these experiences "rough initiations" and calls us to holding all the pain and suffering of life with warmth and compassion, holding life like a face, tenderly, held.

Pain itself is not pathological, pathology emerges from isolation, from the absence of "village", community, connection, belonging, welcome.

The privilege of holding space as a form of ritual ground, where fear and grief and pain can be held with warmth and compassion, to warm the stone child, and breathe life back into our being, and to evoke courage and trust to love life again, it is an extraordinary gift to hold space in this way, and to witness the "initiation process" as one honours the darkness, descends into the pain, and emerges to a place of wholeness once again.

Grief works us in profound ways and reshapes us, taking immense courage and strength to move towards the sadness rather than away, to stay with the waves both small and tidal.

The humility of not knowing in this space, holding space in the uncertainty, letting go of any need to know, navigating life and honouring the rhythm's of the soul.

We live in extreme times, with the truth of impermanence, and a sense that we need to cradle our heart and mind, to have courage to befriend the places within that are frightened, to breathe warmth, and love into ourselves and each other.

To have courage, when we wonder how a body can withstand this, we love life, we hold life, and we become a house of belonging.

We need village more than ever in these days.