Grieving Woman

Red Crystal Earth GAP 1.10.19

On a gray boulder she sits. Round as the stones themselves, face weathered with crevices, in her creased robes of gray she blends in with the mound of boulders.

“I am Grieving Woman,” she says, “I live in the gray zone, I blend in with shadows, where I carry your sorrows, grief, and grievances and mourn them on your behalf.
I am enormous and rotund, shaped this way by your own grievance over your girth, which I hold comfortably in my bulk with a measure of mirth.

I grieve each passing day, each moment in which your children grow and their former selves disappear from sight, held within their own new shapes as they grow away.
I grieve to release your sorrow, which allows you to enjoy their changing voices, faces, thoughts, and rejoice in them, as they are, even as you miss who they once were.

I am Grieving Woman. I mourn to give breath to your sadness, your loneliness. I weep to give sound to the feelings that strum through you, when you feel lost, uncertain, jealous, lack of affection, small, that is when you hear me and feel me in the stream of tears that pour down your face, over your lips as you bite the tears back yet they roll on for no apparent reason, as I am at work in those moments, moving with, in, and through you.

I sweep you away in a wave of emotion in motion; bulging with grief I am enormous, for I have a voracious appetite and capacity to hold grief, along with deep well of tears that give it release.

I am quiet, here in the gray zone, forgotten under the veil of monotonous melancholy, wearing the suit of shadow.

I sit here ponderously, musing upon the rest of your council; they do not include me in their circle. They reject me, my size and bulk alarms them. They find me ugly and taunt, disparage, mock, and revile me; my appearance alone angers them.
I do not aspire to nor do I seek their acceptance. Instead I reflect on what they reveal, ponder on it as I sit alone with none for company, conversation, excluded, unseen, and unheard until I grieve.
I grieve even at this: within your council there is unkindness, anger, and pettiness shutting me out and I grieve for you are your council.

I am Grieving Woman, and I know how to be invisible, hidden, unseen, unheard, unnoticed, alone, and silent.
I neither ask for nor need fanfare, celebration, recognition, distinction, reward, or honor. I know what it means to be humble.
I do what I am here to do: observe quietly and catch what must be mourned, by way of mourning I release and dissolve thus tending to your emotional hygiene.
I have a capacity enormous for compassion, forgiveness, and surrender. I work with your grief, grievances, and sorrows, learn from them then transform them that you are free from the snare of prejudice and grudges toward yourself and others.

I sit here in the open now to show myself to you, to show you the fire inside stones, the passionate river that runs through your bones, for you are ready to know me and I to be known by you now.
I am your transformer, doing my work through grief and surrender.
I am the switch that turns you on to life, allowing your self to die to that which does not serve life, transformed in the litany of sorrow, in a dirge that only you and I, the earth below and the sky above hear, rising from the flames that fan your passion, blowing with the winds formed by feathers of compassion to tenderly bless all they touch as they too pass on by.
I am the one who knows that today winds blow, tomorrow there may be snow, for you are not evergreen and all that you have seen, all that you hold on to is what you must let go of:: the prayers and songs, as leaves on a branch today they too must be given away before long then spring returns and with it frogs that leap into summer where you’ll sow then reap, yet in the end there is nothing that you will keep, neither joy nor sorrow, all is blown away if not today, tomorrow and life continues on so do what you do with joy for a while, rejoice when you do with a smile, hold on to nothing yet while it’s in your care cherish the sweetness there and release it with love and the grace of gratitude shining upon your face.

I am Grieving Woman and I have this gift for you: the wisdom of transformation.”