The Missing Rung

Photo Credit: Joana Kruse

Skipping steps, something that can be exhilarating to engage within and can also become detrimental. Truly, a paradox of when two or more things can be true at once.

Skipping a grade, can one imagine? Maybe you have and can tell us all about it? I knew a few students who this applied to, and I had to pick my chin up off the floor. Who were these wizards, and what might it be like to inhabit their gray matter for even a day?

Playing on the monkey bars, as much as my blistered small hands tried to skip a bar, I physically could not. I’d be dangling by one hand, until I positioned myself once again swinging from one bar to the next. Even as a wee one, I was not made for skipping steps.

Healing from any kind of profound loss is a time in which skipping steps simply has never worked for me, nor for others from what I have witnessed. I might pride myself at how quickly and well I am moving along, until I am not.

Not accepting the needed time, allowing grief and the intense sadness to be inhabited fully. Something that requires our full presence was contained with a step that might have been skipped? Thus the invitation to circle back to become fully immersed within as we sift, sort, and squat within the midst of what has been waiting. 

Part of being human is the desire to rush. We live within a culture where we have received a faulty memo that says, “Fast, More, Quickly…” This is where the unlearning is birthing, because taking our time, not buying into the hustle and bustle, is where each and every step is vital for our ongoing healing and well-being. They exist for a reason, and that can only be discovered if we chose a slow ambling pace. Rather than a hyperventilating sprint resulting in shin splints and even more discomfort.

Perhaps we are being invited to do some reflection and discern if there are any areas in our beings where we might have fallen into the trance of glossing over and dashing. Engaging within some skipping which now we may choose to return to. Intentionally spending our time within to sift, sort, and to receive what is there waiting for us.

Sabine Jacobs, is sharing a beautiful piece about grief that Love shared with her. Allowing herself to be fully immersed within each step. Not a beat skipped. Informing her fully of the brilliance of healing in the midst of great loss and sorrow.

Dear Love, what would you have me know about grief?

Dear Sabi,

What could I possibly tell you about grief?

You - unwilling expert,

fluent in its language,

seasoned by its storms.

So today, I’ll keep it brief,

and give you only this:

the essential truth -

that even in the darkest sorrow,

your heart keeps proving

how boundless love can be.

Grief is not the enemy.

It is love’s shadow,

proof that your heart has stretched itself

toward something so radiant

that its absence feels unbearable.

I would have you know this:

Grief does not mean you are broken.

It means you are alive enough

to have given your whole self to another.

Remember when you were only three,

and your grandfather’s arms

were the first place you learned

what safety and tenderness meant?

Even now, decades later,

you carry his love like a secret light.

His body left, but his care never did.

Remember Jan,

your heart’s great love at twenty-five,

taken in an instant on his bicycle.

That was the day you learned

what “unfassbar” truly means -

a word too small for the cavern it opened in you.

And yet, even through that cavern,

his laughter and presence still echo.

And Justus -

your soul-dog,

your guardian in fur,

the one who tethered you to this earth

when despair whispered otherwise.

Letting him go in his illness

was both the deepest cruelty

and the greatest act of love.

He is not gone, not truly.

He lives in every heartbeat of yours

that still dares to stay.

Do you see?

Every grief you carry

is not an ending,

but a continuation of love

in another form.

Each absence has carved room in you

for a larger tenderness,

a deeper knowing.

So let grief wash over you

like a tide that does not destroy,

but reshapes the shoreline of your being.

On the other side of the ache,

you will find me waiting -

still whole, still yours,

reminding you that love

is the only thing

that survives every crossing.

Always,

Love

Photo Credit: iStock