this your dead reckoning; and your reckoning of the dead. this is your Abundant Anyway. this is showing up when there is nothing else to say, and finding your place within it. this is writing it down when the shapes haven’t strung themselves up on intention and actually formed a single conscious thought.
it is the overcoming itself, even when it takes you under because all of it feels cheap. an unsuccessful barter because no written thing, no matter how ravenously consumed, will ever equal the weight and worth of what you thought you had. its disappearing has left the scales permanently unbalanced, and not a single earthly object will ever set the balance again. we know.
and all i know is everything now feels like waiting. waiting in a way that doesn’t diminish anything, but only ever-grows all. enlarges me somehow. swells me up to a size i had no idea i could ever be; taking a new shape i’m not even sure i want.
yet the stretching out causes me to touch the corners of a room I never noticed i was in– and i call it compassion. no longer afraid of everything outside of myself that threatens to make me more alive. somehow all of that is suddenly safe and worth it. somehow i have started to listen where before i could only hear. somehow the loss of a dream is the gain of a vision and it speaks: there is so much time left not to waste; so much work to be done, so many hands left to hold. so much to find in those very places where there is nothing left to say.
grief will blow you up and round you out. soften your edges and change your shape entirely- if you let it. grief will infuse you with intention. and even though at this moment none of that feels anywhere even close to enough: someday it will be. you have to believe that someday it will be.
-jamie lee finch.
