Loving Life Again

This week I'll be using Tarot of the Secret Forest, created by Lucia Mattioli and published by Lo Scarabeo. I'll also be drawing from the Faeries' Oracle created by Brian Froud with text by Jessica Macbeth; it was published by Simon & Schuster. Today's cards are the Tower and 'The Pook:'

          When the Tower has burned and crumbled, grief comes. I listened yesterday to women in pain: one with a missing child, a new mother with an unexpected diagnosis, and those hurting from betrayals and losses. Ellen Bass ("The Thing Is") describes this crushing emotion in a visceral way:

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.

When you can't breathe from the weight of such grief, it is hard to take hope in the last few lines of the poem. Yet Pook is a reminder of paradox; even in loss, there is also something found. It may be that we awaken to impermanence, not only as an intellectual idea but as a stark reality. We begin to grasp just how precious our trips around the sun are. Or perhaps we experience a sharpening of the senses or a widening of the heart, suddenly making it easier to see subtle goodness and beauty. May we all find a way to love life again.