At the still point of the turning world

A friend's son was wondering about being preserved until some future time in peanut brittle, like Han Solo in carbonite. I'm not sure how well that would work in reality. I do understand the impulse to stop time, though. In many ways, I feel like time stopped in November. Callie died, winter moved in. Life became frozen, a grey sky-wrapped stasis of frozen time, frozen ground.

The only real thing for me has been my grief. I haven't been good at grief; I typically run from it. But she deserves a full measure of grief. Not a rationing out in bits and pieces. Or worse, stuffing it back inside and pretending to be fine. Like her death didn't break me apart and unravel my life.

So I grieve. Allowing myself to feel all my grief for her opened the way for all the rest of the grief I've stuffed away. A huge subterranean lake of grief. And this time, I am not pushing it back, burying it, damming it, ignoring it. I thought if I ever opened the way to my grief, it would come crashing down on me like a tsunami, but it's just bubbling up, a steady bubbling, like the source of a spring. I just hold it all in my open hands, and let it be what it is, and then let it go. I can't hold it. I can't change it. It is what it is. And so I just sit, in stillness, breathing, grieving, breathing, listening, breathing, seeing, breathing, being.

And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
~T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets