September 1st

(a guest post from a beloved)

“September is bittersweet for me…

There was a time I literally cried my eyes out when September came because it meant my summer friends were leaving…
Nights hanging out at the arcade came to a close along with most of the stores.
My street, which had been a constant party, was emptying.
School was starting, and I dreaded it.

As I got older, I began to love September–the cooler days, empty beaches & restaurants.
Parking spots!

Then it happened…

She was taken from me in September, just like my summer friends, just like the crowded streets, the dock parties, the fun.

The pain of September returned.

My mother was gone at what was supposed to be my most ” fun” summer, ever, at the shore–my 21st .

While all my friends did Ladies Nights and Monday Nights at the Princeton, I sat by her bedside.
Slept in her bed beside her,
bathed and changed her.
Read her the crossword puzzle every day.

September came and by the 7th night we knew she was leaving us.

I lay in her bed all night, surrounded by all my siblings and their babies on air mattresses covering her living room floor.
I chose to stay awake all night and stroke her hair and sing her the same lullabies she sang to me as a little girl…
Telling her to let go…
We would be ok…

I left her bedside early that morning to get the coffee started, while everyone else was still asleep, and as I did, she took her last breath.

September would never be the same.

I long to love September as all the locals do, but l just can’t.
The sounds, sights and the cool air just bring me back…

Back to saying goodbye to my friends as a child,
and back to saying good bye to my closest friend, my confidante.

The feeling is always the same on September 1st.

I’m not sure why I’m writing this now–16 years later. I guess seeing all these posts of how lovely September is and wanting so badly to join in…

Maybe by sharing there will be some sort of release.”

~Bonnie Salasin Brown
September 1, 2016

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The Gift of Grief (David Whyte)

One of the radical edges of experience is grief…

The prospect of facing up to the sharper edges of grief can prevent us from having the fullest experience of whatever frontier we are on… (because ) it’s always a great temptation to retreat away from that frontier…
to just “deal with it”…

This narrows the understanding of what you are actually confronting…

 The essence of the ability to feel the fiercer edges of experience is to fully incarnate our life at any one time;
the edges are our existence ripening, and the experience of them allows us to taste the ripe fruit of our experience, thereby celebrating and understanding the particular season that we are experiencing…

 Attempt to feel your aloneness in as startling and clear a way as possible…

The Well of Grief

Those who will not slip

Beneath the still surface on

The well of grief

Turning down through its

Black water to the place

We cannot breathe

will never know

The source from which

We drink

The secret water

cold and clear

Nor find

In the darkness

Glimmering

The small round coins

Thrown

By those who

Asked

for something else

There is a cycle of experience which human beings are heir to which is part of their inheritance…
If you do feel grief and loss fully, it’s suddenly placed in some kind of enormous context that makes sense, that gives you an essential understanding of the beauty and magnificence of the world which we occupy.

(David Whyte)