Full Circles

Reflections on Living

Tag: love

Befriending Grief

February 25, 2022 / / 2 Comments

The experience of grief is not something we would ask for. Grief does not ask for our permission to exist.

Grief is not only losing something or someone outside of our selves. When we lose someone we love, we lose a part of ourselves. It is heartrending.

Steeped in our everyday exchanges , we are sublimated not to think about death. In my Chinese tradition, some might say it’s bad luck to speak about dying. In response, we say “Choi,” in Cantonese, to ward off the words – or even just having those thoughts – articulated.

You could say that reckoning with grief is like trying to stare at the sun. If you look at it directly, it blinds you. But, it illuminates everything. Our world revolves around it.

That’s because Grief has a twin called Love.

Someone who has worked in palliative care and author of Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul Stephen Jenkinson says this,

“Grief is a way of loving that which has slipped from view…
and love is a way of grieving that which it has not yet done so.”


And if we can stand in the sun and take this in for a minute, I believe this will lead us to a place of love again.

Put another way, befriending grief on a daily basis passes us through a threshold from floating along in live to a certain sense of wakefulness.

Like the emphasis we give to our dental hygiene, what we need now is a society of individuals who values and engages in the process of waking up on daily – twice a day.

Wakefulness is the hidden prerequisite to presence.

And what constitutes this contemplation of daily waking up? To be a practitioner of grief.

This is not a grim and austere exercise. Instead, it rends our hearts open to reality… a reality that doesn’t need our consent, that life is finite. Because of its finality, evermore the poignancy of our living.

Buy a flower and put it on your dining table. Its presence differs to a plastic creation. The living flower will wither, the fake models what’s real, but never so. Yet, the flower’s existence penetrates into our consciousness (and if we learn to take it in) of both its temporalness and its gravity of beauty.

A way to grief is to slow down time to love, and a way to love is to befriend grief.

See related: Love’s Near Other–Loss

Love’s Near Other: Loss

February 14, 2020 / / 2 Comments

When we feel the weight of love and joy for the people we care about, we begin to feel the full potency of loss.

Love’s near other is loss.

This surge of pending grief can be almost too much to bear, but if we find a vessel, a holding, a way of living to contain and channel this reality, this has the potential to fully awaken us to the participation of living with presence.

Living with presence in a way that is accord to our true intentions, while penetrating through the noise that permeates most of our existence.

In Praise of The Nurturers of The World

August 18, 2017 / / 5 Comments

MOther and Child Painting

To the Nurturers in our lives, I thank you. You are a gift to this world. You are gift to others. Without you, we’d fail to thrive and grow. 

From the words of Fred Rogers, 

 

“Think of those people who loved you into your being.” 

 

These people belong to the universal Nurturers of the world. Nurturers have a special role in the grant scheme of things. They bring a piece of heaven on earth.

 

To you, dear Nurturers, you are part of someone’s life. Like a gardener, you have sown the seeds for the flowers to grow, tend to soil, and water the plants; the work never ends.

 

Nurturers give. Like my mother, like my grand auntie, like my wife—mother to my two children, like many carers I know from my work with individuals and families. 

 

I heard a story from one my clients. He is a father of a five year old, fighting for his dear life to have shared custody of his child. He wants to be part of his child’s life. He divorced from his wife, but not his child.  He wants to be present. He wants to be a Nurturer for his daughter. It’s an upward battle.

 

Nurturers sometimes give all of themselves away. They forget that when they neglect themselves, they have nothing left to give. Dear Nurturers, please don’t forget about you. Because you are a precious gift. Treat yourself as you would to a beloved. What would you do to nurture that person?

 

A true Nurturer knows how to give AND receive. There is a gift in giving, and there is also a gift in letting others become a giver. By learning to receive, we allow others to feel the blessing you’ve experienced in giving.

 

Because of you—and those before you—a cascade is happening. Passing on love, from one person to the next, one generation to another. The passage of transmission is indeed unpredictable, but it’s also inevitable. It’s inevitable that you, dear Nurturers, have an influence on the one you love.

 

Once again, “think of those people who loved you into your being.” 

 

Take a moment to picture them in your mind as vividly as possible. Visualise them standing right in front of you. Now allow yourself to say a heartfelt, “Thank you.” to them. A mother, a father, an uncle, a teacher, a friend.

 

Better yet, say thank you to each of them.

 

Thank you, dear Nurturers. You have loved me into my being.

 

p/s: I try to remind myself to trade my expectation for appreciation of those around me. It holds an antidote to suffering.

Blessings,

Daryl

Creating Movement in Your Life: Put Your Horse Before the Cart 

October 1, 2016 / / 0 Comments

People often mistake that

  We need to feel confident in order to do something with competence;

  We need to feel loveable in order to love;

  We need to feel good before we do any good;

  We need to know before we act, and

  We need to find the passion before we become good at a something.

It certainly helps if we do. But often, we are mistaken. We have put the carriage before the horse.

screen-shot-2016-10-01-at-8-52-31-am

Often times,

  We simply need to become competent at something in order to build confidence;

  We need to give love in order to feel love;

  We need to do some good before we feel good;

  We need to act in order to know, and

  We need to follow our curiosity before we find our passion.

In this case, we have put the horse before the carriage. And this allows movement.

screen-shot-2016-10-01-at-8-59-28-am

We are to learn not just to think on our feet, but to think with our feet.

There is wisdom in our feet. We are not designed to be sedentary creatures. We are designed to grow, and growing takes place when we move, both in our inner lives and our mortal flesh.

I look at my 3-year-old daughter. She thinks with her feet by trying things, even if it means that she might get a scolding or two for testing our limits.

Composers, movie directors, performers, writers and storytellers know the importance of creating dynamic movement in order to an experience to come alive.

We are designed to move and be moved. No horse with the carriage in front is going to get very far.


 

footnote: I gave a shot at drawing. Not the best, by I hope it does the job. 

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