The only inevitable conclusion to loss...

She remembers laying in bed with him one night, white and cold outside the window, holding each other she began to cry.

Crying because of the love she felt and how it was calling her to confront the idea she held that love will always lead to inevitable loss.

The thought was aching in her soul.

He asked her why it couldn’t be forever and he was both shocked and amused by what she had to say.

She said “Even if it is forever, and say forever is our lifetimes. I’ll still loose you at the end. When this human journey is over for us, I’ll still loose you to death.”

How bleak.

But also, she’s not afraid to talk about the reality of death.

She knows it well.

She has been visited by both loss and love in equal measure.

She’s learned that death and birth are one in the same.

As one comes, the other goes.

He didn’t fully understand her in that moment, though he tried.

He felt a glimpse into that space in her, where he met her relationship to loss.

He saw how deeply it sits with her.

How familiar it feels in her soul.

How sometimes the lines that differentiate tears of sadness from joy get blurred for her.

How there’s a part of her that quietly anticipates the sharp sting of hearing that something she loves will no longer be with her.

He simply held her there, with an open heart and conscious breath.

She didn’t fully understand this part of her either, until later she decided to sit with it.

What she found, was that through the depth of grief this life had shown her she cultivated a belief that granted her a false sense of security by convincing her to anticipate loss as inevitable.

What she realized was that in some way this was actually a resistance to accepting love’s essence fully in the present moment.

A resistance to her own capacity to love more deeply, to open more fully, and to surrender into love’s unfailing presence.

So she decided to open into a wider truth:

The loss doesn’t teach us that something is gone, it teaches us how much is really there.

The loss is the evidence of the love that we can share, and hold.

The capacity we have to let love unfold and crack us open into even more of ourselves is the very thing that helps us break away from our conditioned shells.

So she settled, into the very real awareness that her fragile heart is also resilient to the bone and her spirit somehow continued still, to always desire for more love.

Breathtaking.

She took a deep inhale next to him and they let it go together and realized the loss of anything is not a failed destination.

So they relaxed. If this was their last winter, it would be one spent at home.

That is when she remembered for all of us, that loss is a compass leading us to all the ways in which our hearts yearn to open for love’s sake. Even when everything around us suggests we should close.

In Loss, In Heartbreak, In Grief..

Our heart is actually opening.

Opening to the ways in which we will cherish love differently now.

Opening to the ways in which we’ll be forever grateful for how we were blessed enough to experience love in this way, in this person, in this place, in this thing that moved us.

Opening to the carved out marks those memories will forever leave on the way we choose to show up to love from now on.

Opening to the stubborn release of the stories we tell ourselves about what love was meant to look like there.

Opening to the lessons we’ve learned from that sacred love’s gifts.

Opening to the settling into ourselves while holding the humbling and terrifying experience of redirecting that love back toward our own hearts.

Not to take away from what was, but so we can get through this.

So we can heal. So we can grow.

So we can mend our now tender and cracked open heart into a place of acceptance, that love is somehow still here with us.

Potent in the Grief.

Where we realize the truth,

that the only inevitable conclusion to loss is more Love.