September 2017 | GOOD GRIEF

September 2017

GOOD GRIEF

After the harvest, we know full well the leaves will drift and drop leaving the trees bereft, and that this natural cycle of loss takes place in us, too. Do we enter these spaces willingly when memories of so many losses may haunt?

The leaves replenish the Earth. Can their demise be welcomed or avoided? Death – my pain, my friend, breaker of old patterns, renewer, transformer.

“Pay attention, feel what is happening to the Earth in your own neighborhoods and cities. Allow your heart to ache. Only when we fully face and truly feel our loss and our grief can we open the way to the new life that awaits us.” Llewellyn Vaughan Lee and Hilary Hart, Spiritual Ecology: 10 Practices to Reawaken the Sacred in Everyday Life.

Who Speaks to the Trees?

Three massacres have I witnessed. Our one-legged cousins lie sprawled on our Mother’s dusty face

                                       yet I hear you

                                                  I hear you

                                                           I hear you

weeping, bleeding, uprooted.

For one hundred years you faithfully gave your quenching fruit, shelter and shade to all who came.

Commit genocide? Not the bulldozer driver— his kids need clothing and feeding. Nor the compadres hammering stakes and setting irrigation for the new cash crop— they have families and obligations. Nor the owners, who believe a coastal touch of fog, perfect for these grapes, will soon play upon our lips.

And so, dear Mother, what can I say to you?

How can I make amends?

Stings of Shining Silence: Earth-Love Poems