The rich soil of grief

There are times when life does not ask us to rise, heal, transcend, or become better versions of ourselves. It asks something far more difficult. It asks us to descend.

To allow the structures we’ve built our identity around to loosen and, at times, to collapse entirely. The dream of who we thought we would become. The life we imagined would unfold in a certain way. The image of ourselves we worked so hard to protect. There are seasons when something underneath all of that begins to die, and no amount of positive thinking, spiritual effort, or psychological understanding can restore the previous arrangement.

And while the mind often interprets this as failure or mistake, the older traditions understood something different. They understood that there are initiations that arrive not through light, but through darkening. Through disorientation. Through grief. Through being taken underneath the surface of things.

In many of the ancient stories, the Goddess leads us downward. Into the earth. Into the cave. Into the mud and the underworld. Not as punishment, but as participation in a deeper rhythm of transformation that the modern world has largely forgotten. There are dimensions of the soul that can only awaken in the dark.

There are times when we are meant to be undone.

Not forever. Not as an end in itself. But because something false, exhausted, or too small can no longer carry the weight of our life. And so we are brought closer to the ground. Closer to the body. Closer to grief. Closer to the vulnerability we have spent years trying to outrun.

This descent often feels unbearable because it asks us to relinquish control. To stop managing the mystery. To stop demanding immediate clarity. To stop treating sorrow as an interruption to life rather than part of its deep ecology.

But when grief is allowed to move consciously, something begins to soften beneath the surface. Frozen places begin to thaw. The defended heart becomes more permeable. Perception changes. We begin to see differently, not because we have escaped suffering, but because suffering has humbled and ripened us.

The old alchemists understood that there are phases of transformation where everything appears ruined. Where the vessel blackens. Where certainty dissolves. Where we are stripped of the fantasy of mastery and brought into direct contact with what is fragile, mortal, and unfinished within us.

And yet something sacred is often taking place there.

Not in spite of the descent, but through it.

There are seasons when being brought into the earth is precisely how the soul is restored to itself.

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Who is Holding Whom?

Space is too wild, undomesticated, and vast to be "held."

The image of “holding” is an evocative one that has given rise to the idea of “holding space” for another, where we’re attuned to what they’re feeling and how they’re making sense of their experience.

Through empathic resonance, they feel felt and understood.

While I’m sympathetic to this view, it’s not completely accurate for me in lived experience.

When with another who is spiraling outside their window of tolerance, it’s not me who is “doing” the holding. There is “holding” occurring, but in no way is it “mine.”

I can recognize and participate in this holding and practice devotion toward it, but it doesn’t originate in me. It originates in the stars and in the soil.

My role is to move into reverie, to set aside any fantasy that I know what healing is, and to listen. To move into awe. To wonder. To pray.

Even the agenda to "hold space" can interfere with that unfolding, contaminating the vessel.

Space cannot be held…
… but entered into and loved.

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What we lose on the healing and awakening path

Much is said these days about healing and spiritual transformation, and the deep joy, clarity, and peace that are the promised fruits of the inner journey.

Not much is mentioned, however, about the disappointment involved in waking up, and the immense deflation wired into the transformative process.

It doesn’t really sell that well.

“Making the darkness conscious,” as Jung noted, “is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”

Healing can break our hearts and shatter old dreams. It is oriented in birth and death, creativity and destruction, transcendent and descendent currents, and must by its nature dance in the full spectrum.

Not only does it involve resurrection, but the chaotic glory of the crucifixion as well.

While it is natural to have a bias for renewal and rebirth, it would appear the beloved does not share this bias as he or she (or it or they) will make equal use of the alchemical processes of dissolution and putrefactio to open us into her world – each holy arrows in her quiver.

We want to heal but we don’t want to have to feel too much. We want to feel fully alive, but not too vulnerable and tenderized. This is so understandable and so human and need not be shamed. But it doesn’t seem to always work like that, not in this star anyway, where shakiness is the portal.

At times, “getting what I want” is no longer a majestic or sensitive-enough reference point around which to organize our experience. Love is the new organizer and may have a different idea.

Relationships ending, dreams collapsing, careers recycling, the dissolving of the way it was all supposed to turn out: these yellowings of soul are not evidence of error, failure, or defeat, but of the relentlessly creative nature of love as it emerges here. One form dying so that another may come into being.

Yes, at times the burning can seem unbearable. Such is the nature of the human heart. We may burn until we are translucent, but it is by way of this burning that wholeness is revealed.

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