I’ve been thinking about grieving and mourning a lot recently. It is front and center for so many right now in a very public way, and not just with death and dying but with dramatic life changes – at least in the U.S. When someone does die, we have been robbed of our ability to hold our rituals so we are left to figure out what can mark or note this event. It seems wrong and rather incomplete to just go on.
But I suspect that is what we were doing anyway. That we haven’t been tending our souls for some time. As importantly, we have not been tending each others’ souls nor gathering to “halve the sorrow and multiply the joy”. We had become so caught up in the urgent trivial that we forgot to tend.
Tending requires slow time. It can’t be rushed. It cannot be part of a checklist for the day.
The agrarian rhythms were meant to stretch our waiting. To focus us on developing and pruning and weighing out the wheat and the chaff.
Grief, if allowed, will gently and, oh so quietly, blow away the chaff from the wheat. We’ve become so hurried we are keeping the chaff and missing the wheat, missing the components of the Bread of Life.
Just Sayin' 