learning to lose
and getting to grips with grief — in any and every way, shape and size it shows up in life.
learning to lose
On the one hand, I want to encourage you in your grief, so that you may fully experience it in all its depth. For as an encounter with a new intensity, it is a profound experience of life and leads you back toward life again, as all things do that reach a certain degree of extremity.
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Give to someone only as much of you they are able to receive. If their vessel isn’t spacious enough to hold all of you, there will only be an overflow of rejection.”
In my thirties, I learned that there is a type of pain in life that I want to feel. It’s the inevitable, excruciating, necessary pain of losing beautiful things: trust, dreams, health, animals, relationships, people. This kind of pain is the price of love, the cost of living a brave, openhearted life—and I’ll pay it.
Glennon Doyle • Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living: THE NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
a house where you have cried over multiple heartbreaks is infinitely better than a house where you’ve only cried over one, defining, bad thing.
Christina Joyce Hauser • The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays
pure love never dies, we just stop updating the context that feeds the immediate feeling.
To let go, when you know you have to is like choosing both grief and hope. Hope that you have control over your life, hope that there is something that is more in alignment for you out there. But you are giving up the possibility of the known joy. There must have been something you are letting go of that is meaningful and beautiful. Letting go, for
... See moresource People I’ve Loved
Grief doesn't go away. It exists on a different plain from life and intersects less and less with life as time goes on. The last place it visits you is in dreams. By this time, you don’t want it to go away.
Last week I planted an acer in the furthest bed from the house, in honour of our new baby. The sapling is as tall as me and, by all accounts, it can grow forty feet tall. So, in thirty years’ time, if we’re still here I can come back and see this tree in its maturity. But the thought depresses me: in thirty years’ time I’ll be in my mid sixties and
... See more