My Brilliant Career (2)/Grief for the Sorrows of the World

You may know Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief.

The third gate is for the sorrows of the world and, when I read my second quote from “My Brilliant Career” from 1901, I thought how it could have been written this summer as many countries experienced unprecedented heat. Here it is. It’s quite a heavy read!

All nature was weary, and seemed to sing a dirge to that effect in the furnace-breath wind which roared among the trees on the low ranges at our back and smote the parched and thirsty ground. All were weary, all but the sun. He seemed to glory in his power, relentless and untiring, as he swung boldly in the sky, triumphantly leering down upon his helpless victims. Weariness! Weariness!

What a great dull hard rock the world was! On it were a few barren narrow ledges, and on these, by exerting ourselves so that the force wears off our finger-nails, it allows us to hang for a year or two, and then hurls us off into outer darkness and oblivion, perhaps to endure worse torture than this.

My reason for posting this is that I carry grief for the sorrow of the world much of the time. If that’s true for you, or if you carry grief for other reasons, then I encourage you to allow yourself to experience the grief rather than try to hide it or push it away. Grief-tending always involves naming the grief, and allowing grieving so that, often with tears, the grief flows through us and heals us, rather than getting stuck and damaging us.

Ask for support (from me, from someone in your life) and support yourself by allowing the grief and by holding yourself with compassion, just as I’m sure you would hold someone else who is grieving.

Grieve well