[Dialogue] [Oe List ...] Four Gates of Grief

[James Wiegel]

Thanks, Karen, thanks, Ellie

Calmly??  

Ellie, that whole poem was just sitting inside you and out it came?  What amazing people there are in this world!  Wasn't there a conversation on tears somewhere in our past??  And still  . . .

For me, a bunch of recollections came up -- I recalled being with my father when he died, and the day in Brussels when the large trees rimming the garden were trimmed way, way down -- and the looks of grief on colleagues faces watching the trimming happen and the time I facilitated a Practical Vision workshop (in Maliwada, as I recall) and it started slowly and then the visions were just bubbling forth -- a preschool, healthy food, a new well, employment, . . . And then, towards the end of the naming, and the group got very quiet and very serious and sort of sad . . . And I worried that I had done something to offend . . . So I asked -- I think it was Rukminibhai, what happened, had I done some clumsy, inappropriate thing -- and she said, "This was exciting, but it is not as though we haven't thought of and dreamed of those things before . . . So often, when we have, they haven't happened -- we were defeated, deflected, blocked . . . And that reminder is what brought up the sadness in us . . --  and I thought about contradictions . . 

My sister and I talk on the phone each week so I sent her your emails, and some of my reflections and said I wanted to talk a bit about grief and memories of deaths in our family.  This was interesting to me -- at the start of our call, she enumerated the artefacts she had assembled to surround her as we talked -- an opal ring from Mother, a gold chain with a cross from Grandma, remembrance of a handkerchief belonging to my sister which Mother had placed in Grandma's casket . . .  

Jim Wiegel
“We are all time travelers journeying into the future. But let us make that future a place we want to visit. “       Stephen Hawking

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