These Last Few Days

These last few days have been very emotional.

It began with a disturbing dream. No sooner is that recorded on my journal then I receive an email from my sister asking that I call her right away. "Bad news" she wrote.

Loss is .. well, loss. It is emptiness and darkness and sadness and memory that floods the heart. Then there is the sadness of others. The two combined create so much pressure that its amazing the human heart is capable of such resiliance. But it is.

We say, 'Life goes on', or 'We must be strong', and other pithy sayings that are more mumbled in rote than actually believed at the moment. Or perhaps even the long run.

Yes, life does go on, but diffently. Nothing is ever the same once the loss has riped the fabric of our being. Colors are not the same, nor are smells or sound or .. just anything. Its as if, instantly, you have been thrust into a world like your own but different. One that is now missing a key component. Something that made the colors brighter, the smells more rich and sound more intense.

Senses are numbed and stay so, so that life goes on in this new numbed existence. Yes, life goes on .. but different.

And 'religion'. Why does it come to play now, in these moments of bereavement? Well, certainly, every injury needs a support - either temporary or long-term. This I understand, but choose not to lean upon.

In loss I have not chosen the route of religion, not wanting to cloud my sensations with thoughts of a higher power, but letting human emotion sweep over me like a winter storm - dark and sudden, cold and bitter.

"The unexamined life is not worth living", or so said a man who once lived in ancient Athens. I agree with his words for in them I feel their truth.

Numbed from loss? Certainly .. and unrecoverably so. But unable to examine that numbness? No. If anything, it is all too real, to painful, to punch-in-the-gut, air-escaping, world collapsingly clear to not examine.

Which brings me to the message in this post: Encouragement.

Darkness comes .. sometimes suddenly so .. crippling even. And it is followed by Dawn, who is not always the ray of light-encouragement, but a reminder that we must live on with a new reality .. casting light upon the different world around us. For myself, that different insight is one not shadowed by superstition, but worth examining anew. A new world minus one.

The world is filled with broken-hearted and open-eyed examiners. To them the future is ever new, and that is encouraging.

Om Peace!
Yogini Valarie Devi