A Season of Grief

I have an interest in grief as a process, a season, and a source of spiritual energy, intent and vision. I’m currently making my way through a year-long workshop exploring this topic and hope to relate it to my life’s work.

It may seem counter intuitive to begin an exploration of grief in the spring. Even in magical practices, we refer to the second half of the western calendar year as the “dark season”. We talk about the retreat of the soul into the underworld during that time. A time of reflection and retreat. A time when the earth appears frozen and under the cloak of the seasonal death that is winter…

Spring is said to be about life and renewal, hope and the beginning of abundance. And it is, but…

As a person who immerses herself in the natural world in order to make sense of the world that we’ve created, I can tell you that spring is hard. Life in nature is beautiful in a way that you can’t make sense of in the midst of it happening all around you. Reminders that within beauty there is often struggle and sometimes pain. Acknowledgment that nothing in this world is for certain.

The storm that took what was left of the old oak tree alongside the creek, leaving behind only a sliver of what was once a towering giant, reaching for the sun; the baby rabbit I cradled after the cat dropped it in frustration with my arrival upon the scene, first appearing unharmed and only stunned by her experience but later visited by the unending sleep; the countless baby birds that never fly; the earthworms in pools of excess water, pushed from the ground to the surface and drowned; the unborn fawn dead along the road with what is left of its mother not far away. Spring is like a magnifier, peeling back the veil of how we want to imagine that life unfolds, to reveal that it is as full of loss as of beginnings.

This intertwining of life and death is more evident in spring than any other season. This dance of creation and endings, so imperfectly orchestrated that the moments of it shift in and out of each other and brush against my insides from all angles. They catch in my breath and at the impasse of the instant I want to turn away, I see the other side and I take another jagged breath and go on. Because here is the thing ~ even though I see heartbreaking things I know that another bird will peck through the egg that contains him and turn his little beak to the sky for food. I know that I will come upon a fawn in the woods on a foggy morning as she sniffs the air with something that looks like wonder. And I will smile at the beauty that spring has gifted us all.

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