Grief is Not Despair

Greetings from seat 33A 💺

The earth has rolled over into Pisces season, and I’m swimming in the vast sea of our collective emotionality. Join me for a moment in the deep where we’re sensing into the subtleties between grief & despair. Did I mention it was Pisces season?

Grief is a portal.

Imagine if you will, the experience of grief. What does that feel like in your body? What are the sensations?

Now imagine the experience of despair. What shifts? Where does the energy go?

In my experience, grief feels intensely physical. It’s as though my heart and inner cosmos are working through the labor of birthing new galaxies, wrestling with themselves as my heart bursts, finds a new center of gravity, and bursts again. My creature response has often been to follow its lead and get gravitationally physical. That is, I lift weights or do some type of resistance exercises. I sob and let the convulsions rock my core so my inner planetary satellites can readjust their orbits.

Despair on the other hand has always felt disembodied, as though the wind’s been knocked out of me and I’m everywhere and nowhere, and nothing feels real anymore.

I was [not] surprised to find that their etymologies hint at these dis/embodied manifestations.

Grief, from grieve, from the Old French grever (to burden), from the Latin gravare which comes from gravis (heavy or grave).

Despair, from the Old French desperer (to lose hope), from the Latin desperare (de- ‘down from’ + spearae ‘hope’). If hope is an expectation grounded in the future—the unknown place where we go when we disembark from the present, then losing hope is to also lose ourselves in the abyss that lies between. Untethered from the present, no anchor to draw us towards our becoming.

Grief is not despair.

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It may seem obvious to some, but learning to make this distinction has fundamentally shifted how I navigate persistent disruptive [collective] emotional states—*gestures towards current world events*

Simply asking, “where is my heart?” quantum leaps me back into the present. By using this bottom-up processing I can discern where I need to apply spiritual strategy in order to return some semblance of coherence in my emotional & mental realms.

If my heart feels heavy, how can I move my body to help the grief move through me? What shapes does my body want to be in? How can I support my heart & my body so that they have enough energy and rest to grieve without slipping into depletion or exhaustion?

If my heart feels disconnected or like a scattered nothingness, what small thing can I look forward to today? Tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Who or what is still there, anchored in our imagined futures? Am I still there? Are you? Are we? What ritual can I return to that honors the cycle of “order, disorder, & reorder”*?

At risk of repeating myself, I want to get super clear on the strategy here. This isn’t a zeroing in on the grief or the despair as a way to spiritually manhandle it into a manageable form. Instead, I’m focusing my attention on supporting my heart & my creature body and then trusting their genius to process & integrate these emotions. They are the ones who know where we are & what we’re here for.

Perspective over perfection.

As a not-quite-afterthought in honor of the full moon in Virgo we’ve just transited through, I want to touch on the concept of perfection. I think of perfection as the shadowy twin of excellence. I don’t have any brainy reason for feeling the way I feel about these two, so bear with me as we muse.

The way I experience perfection is as though there is a future ideal at Point B, and I’m at an ever-shifting Point A, attempting to match where I am to where this future ideal sits. Until I do, I simply never arrive and exist in a low-key state of frustration, failure, and disappointment.

But excellence is an ongoing phenomenon that happens in-process. Every step in the creative process can drip with excellence. From the fully present breath of initial intention, to the final release of our creation.

Perfection is rigid & exact; like too-tight shoes you want everyone to see but don’t want to wear out lest they get dirty. Excellence is fluid & intuitive; like running barefoot in soft dewy grass as the summer sun illuminates the magical beauty of life on earth. Perfection already knows everything, excellence invites in the miraculous.

I’ve decided to work on my relationship with perfection. Try as I have to shift towards excellence, decades of conditioning towards perfection has my mind in a bit of a vice grip. Moving forward, my aim is this: in moments of frustration during the creative process of, well, everything, because life is art, baby!, I’m gonna take a moment to pause, create some psychic distance between my Point A and the Point B I’m working towards, and ask myself “how is this moment I’m in right now already perfect?” In other words, how can I soften my myopic tunnel vision to behold the miracle I’m living into?

It reminds me of a time in Java nearly ten years ago. I was leaning on the ledge of a balcony in the darkening twilight, aggressively straining my eyes to see the birds my ears knew must be in the mature rice paddy below. It wasn’t until I stopped looking so hard and softened my eyes that I could finally discern easily a hundred birds clinging to the stalks, chirping and flittering their wings. I was transfixed, no-mind, swept up in the symphony of all beings. The phrase “look quietly” echoed in my mind and seems to fit this feeling around perfection… perfectly.

Look quietly at your life, my friends. Accept the perfection of this moment and may this alchemically transform us all into miraculous purveyors of excellence.

Thank you as always for the gift of your attention.

For the next week, I’m home with my parents and feeling the fullness of a life lived in the deep 🧜🏼 I hope kindness finds you wherever you are. I hope you get the opportunity to be that kindness for someone else.

I’m praying for peace, and maybe even more, I’m praying for courage & creative love.

with love,
heather 💜

*Thinking about chaos in terms of our faith through the states of order, disorder, & reorder is a beautiful framework I recently picked up from Richard Rohr.