Are we really all alone after all?

A journey through grief

Hello love, 

It’s late afternoon. There’s cauliflower on the counter waiting to be chopped for dinner and I’m sitting on the couch with two candles lit for company and Cold Play in the background. A very particular and possibly odd combination of ingredients for a Friday afternoon, now that I think of it, but it feels right with the rain and the gray and the feeling hanging within me. 

I haven’t known how to show up here or really anywhere. The world feels fragile, more so than usual, in personal ways, communal ways, and global ways. 

The instability around and within me these past weeks seeps into my mind and spreads like ink in water turning the truth upside down and inside out. I watch myself turn away from hope, caught by the strength of my deepest fears. 

Are we really all alone after all?  

I’ve spent a lot of time on the couch, staying up late, giving myself the kind of numb relief found in the rewatching of an old tv series and it’s fictional drama. But when the computer shuts and there’s nowhere to hide I find myself submerged in the cloud of fear that hangs on my shoulders and closes in around me in the pause. 

It takes gentle effort to crawl from the darkness that fear plunges me into, and slowly I begin the journey through grief. Feeling it all. Allowing the river of tears run down my face and onto the fabric of my shirt like a dusting of raindrops. I locate my breath only after waves of heaving in my chest as if there’s a shell to be cracked.

And in the letting go and the letting through I find my way back to a truth found in this place where grief meets love and I’m carried back to myself, and to you, and the entire universe. 

No, my love, we are not alone after all. 

I’m there in the fear. 

I’m there in the pain.

I’m there in the grief. 

I’m there in the unknown. 

I’m there in the upside down and inside out of the truth.

And through it all, I’m there with love.

Millions of tiny beings clinging to the rocks on the Oregon coast at the mercy of the ebb and flow of the tide. A reminder that we are all just trying to survive in the sea of this great universe, and if we can do it with a little more love and kindness for ourselves and one another, then maybe we can bring a little more light to this world.

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With endless love and deep gratitude,
Raina

www.findingstillness.one

P.S. When was the last time you acknowledged how much you’ve been doing and just how incredible you are? Maybe take a moment to do that now. I promise you deserve that acknowledgment and so much more.