Tag Archives: conversation

Standing up…

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Conversation may be the beginning of connection.  Continuing the conversation is a way to deepen connection.  I suppose not every conversation needs to be continued. Maybe some are pretty complete in and of themselves.   But those that bring understanding and growth?  I think we are in desperate need of continuing those.

I wondered which GrowthLines conversations were waiting to be continued.  I wanted to see which posts struck the deepest chord with readers.  I was a little surprised to discover that Dominoes falling, had been viewedDSC_0090 more times than any other. I reread the words looking for clues to their impact.

When the dominoes of life start falling, words have the power to help and to heal.  Words offer understanding.  They give us permission to stumble in our grief.  Words bear witness to what we already know by experience.  That loss will come, over and over again, and will lay us low.  We need those words of understanding, both silent and spoken when we’re swept under waves of loss and grief.

Maybe we also need words that bear witness to what we’re not so certain of.  That we can stand again. That we can pull ourselves upright.  Put one foot in front of the other.  And begin to walk, again.  Choose to sit and speak words of comDSC_1428fort to someone today.  And when they are ready to rise and walk, stand with them and speak words of hope and encouragement.  I know we will fall under the weight of loss.  I believe we can stand again.

“The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.”
― William Hazlitt, Selected Essays, 1778-1830

Breathe, hold on, and keep talking…

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Five years ago I began with a question.  “Why blog?”.  I saw writing as a way to think out loud.  A way to start a conversation, both within myself and with others.  Since that first conversation there have been days that words came easily, almost faster than I could record them.  Some days the words were slow to come, filled with rough edges and poor fits. Then there were dry spells.  Sometimes brief.  Sometimes lasting months.  It was after a prolonged word drought that I asked myself, “Why keep blogging?”.Cabin-Brothers

Starting the conversation is important.  I have experienced and observed the harm done when we are afraid to begin talking about hard, uncomfortable things.  The willingness to keep talking is critical.  It is in the ongoing conversation that we know ourselves better. The good, the bad, and the ugly.  Continuing the conversation creates connection and relationship.  When we keep talking, we weave the threads of connection into the fabric of community.

Conversation is about talking.  Conversation is also about being, breathing.  In the discomfort of the dry spell we”re at risk of believing the connection and the conversation are over.  But maybe it’s just winter.  A time to slow down, crawl inside ourselves. To breathe and reflect. To emerge again to listen to the words of others.  To speak the words of community.  So, I will take a breathe, listen, and continue the conversation.

Leaning in…

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I was listening to a Hazelden webinar on adolescent suicide.  The presenter talked about the importance of engaging the suicidal teen, encouraging them to talk.  She identified the three most important words to say when you’re the one being told, “Sometimes I feel like killing myself.”  What were the words she thought had such power to connect? “Tell me more.”  Three small words with the potential to change the course of a person’s life.

“Tell me more.”  Three words that invite someone to share their pain and confusion.  Why are those words so often left unspoken?  Perhaps because encouraging someone to hand us their pain may be the right thing to do, but it is rarely the easy thing to do.   In fact the willingness to stand and hold another’s pain often leaves us facing our own discomfort.

“Tell me more.”  I replayed those three words as I went about my day.  I thought about how they fit other situations.  How powerful those words could be with those who grieve.  How in the midst of grief we long for someone to ask us to tell them more about who and what we have lost.  How holding the pain of someone else’s loss feels uncertain and uncomfortable, and so we hold back.

I was still chewing on the benefit and difficulty of “Tell me more”, when my weekly dose of Modern Family came on.  It is Phil Dunphy’s favorite day, leap day.  He has big plans to do something out of the ordinary to celebrate.  But as the day continues, things begin to fall apart.  Phil pulls the two boys, Luke and Manny aside in an attempt to salvage their celebration.  He leans toward them and says in a low, somber voice, “I have a plan.”  The boys just stand there.  Phil adds, “It’s kind of traditional to lean in when someone says they have a plan.”  Both boys immediately lean into the circle.  No hesitation. Focused.

That’s when it came to me.  What Phil Dunphy had to say was important.  And when someone has something important to say, we need to lean in.  To lean in and embrace what is being said, giving the words, the feelings, and the person our presence. Perhaps no territory feels more uncertain and overwhelming than the landscape of grief and loss.  When we find ourselves in the presence of wounded travelers and their story, needing to lean in, our first impulse may be to just stand there.  Sometimes we even step away.

Forty five years ago, John Drakeford wrote a book titled, The Awesome Power of the Listening Ear.  It was a book about the “power of simply listening to others”.  I think Drakeford’s intent was to help us push past discomfort to a place of leaning in.  A place of inviting others to tell us their stories.  What if in the presence of grief and loss, we begin to lean in, and quietly say “Tell me more.”

“Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.” ~ George Eliot

Singing my ABCs…

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I want to say big thank you to Debbie at Two Minutes of Grace, for sharing the ABC award with me. The time it has taken me to respond is no indication of how much I appreciate being thought of by Debbie.

The ABC instructions are:

Add the logo to your site.
Pass the ABC award on to other bloggers.
Use the alphabet to make a list of words describing you so readers will learn more about you.

I am pleased to pass the ABC award along to these wonderful bloggers:

bethechangenyc

The Reinvented Lass

Carol Wiebe Wonders Out Loud

Slowmoto.Me

grandfathersky

for the love of Nike

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally, and often far more, worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” ~ C.S. Lewis 

Debbie, I borrowed your C.S. Lewis quote to introduce my ABC list, not of words, but of children’s books I love.  Some are from my own childhood, some from my daughters, and some I have enjoyed reading to my grandchildren.  I have used many of them in my therapy practice with people of all ages.

An Alphabet of Children’s Books

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day – Judith Viorst
Angelina Ballerina – Katharine Holabird
Are You My Mother? – Phillip D. Eastman

Best Friends for Frances – Russell Hoban

Corduroy – Don Freeman, Calamity – Camilla Ashworth

Dinosaur’s Divorce – Marc Brown

Ella the Elegant Elephant – Carmela & Steven D’Amico

Franklin in the Dark – Paulette Bourgeois

Giving Tree, The – Shel Silverstein
Guess How Much I Love You – Sam McBratney

Horatio’s Bed – Camilla Ashforth

I Promise I’ll Find You – Heather Patricia Ward
I Was So Mad – Mercer Mayer

Just Like You – Jean Fearnley
Just Go to Bed – Mercer Mayer

Kissing Hand, The – Aubrey Penn

Llama, llama, Red Pajama – Anna Dewdney

Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane – Kate DiCamillo 
Midnight Farm, The – Reeve Lindbergh

Not A Box – Laura Vacaro Seeger

Oh The Places You’ll Go – Dr. Seuss
On The Night You Were Born – Nancy Tillan

Polar Express, The – Chris Van Allsburg

Quiet Book, The – Deborah Underwood

Ride a Purple Pelican  – Jack Prelutsky

Stellaluna – Janell Cannon
Snowy Day, The – Ezra Jack Keats

Talking Like the Rain – X.J. & Dorothy M. Kennedy

Up and Down – Oliver Jeffers

Velveteen Rabbit, The – Margery Williams

Whale’s Song, The – Dyan Sheldon

Pooh’s Xylophone Book,  closest I could come to get an “X”. 

You and Me, Little Bear – Martin Waddell 

Zoo for Mr. Muster, A – Arnold Lobel

How many of you have found yourselves singing the ABC song in your head, maybe even under your breath, when trying to put something in alphabetical order?  Please tell me I’m not the only one.

a motherless child

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“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.  Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.  Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home,”.

Reading this post may be like sifting through a pile of scattered thoughts.  A reflection in itself of the fact that losing a parent is an experience that covers the lifespan.  My hope is that you will see it as a continuing conversation, not a final answer.  And that you may find some encouragement and strength for your journey.

The loss of a parent may be one of the broadest experiences of loss.  No stage of life guarantees us that our parent’s death will go unfelt or unmourned.  No stage offers us immunity from feeling that loss, or facing the change it brings.

The younger we are the more our loss may encompass grieving the parent we never knew.  For a child, the death of their parent can mean living with the nagging feeling of having been left.  Not unlike being left on a hiking trail without our guide, before we’re confident of our ability to find our own way.  When one parent dies, a child often loses the other parent to their own grief.  We may feel isolated as we try to protect the other parent from feeling our shared pain.  Sometimes we arrive in adulthood carrying the wounds of childhood losses experienced before we had an older, wiser, more forgiving language.  A language to help us both describe and soothe our pain.

The feeling of being left can come at any age.  As though the color of abandonment is present for each of us, just in different shades based on the time and circumstances.  When my dad’s mother died I recall him saying reflectively, “Now I’m the oldest living member of my family”. There was sadness, resolve, and a touch of uncertainty in his voice.  I was surprised.  There were ways he had lost her long before that moment, to the dementia that swallowed her up one bite at a time.  And even before that when her 13 year son died suddenly from spinal meningitis.  She was forever changed, and at age 11 my dad lost his brother and became the oldest son, bearing the weight of hopes and dreams not yet lived.  It struck me that all of those losses, sudden and progressive, did not protect him from the finality of that moment.  Of knowing that he would never have more of her in this life than had been gathered from his birth up to the time of her death.  And that in the starkest of realities, the buck now stopped with him.

Our experience of loss may also be colored by the gap between who we needed our parent to be and who they actually were.  We can believe that an abusive parent’s death will bring relief and freedom from our pain, only to discover that in being rid of harm we also lost all possibility that the parent we need would someday appear.  Whatever has been left unsaid, the acknowledgement of harm, the “I’m sorry”, the “Please forgive me”, will forever be unspoken, silenced by our parent’s exit.  It can be a devastating and confusing loss.

Words said that can’t be taken back.  Words never said that we wish could be spoken.  Questions never asked.  Choices never explained.  Stories never told.  All these and more are frozen in time for us when a parent dies.  Their weight varies depending on where we are in this marathon. From being parented in infancy through the love hate race of adolescence.  From the renegotiated relay of adulthood to the discomfort of accepting the baton to run this final leg of the race as our parent’s parent.  And if they cross the finish line before us, to know it is ours to grieve the success and failure of their life, ours to allow them to rest in peace in their death.  Ours to learn to run our own race untethered by what is now behind us.

“I am amputated, inconsolable.  My father has died.
Now I must invent him, perhaps fictionalize, mythologize him.
Most of all, I will have to find a way to mourn him.
E. M. Broner, Mornings and Mourning:  A Kaddish Journal

Grief in hiding…

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We all grieve.  But each in our own way.  Grief as fact is universal.  Grief as experience is personal.  There are common themes, but even those are shaped by our personal touch.  Regardless of your way of grieving, it’s important to remember two things.  Loss may be an event.  Grief is a process.

What we know in theory, sometimes becomes blurry in reality.  We bring our own histories and personalities to this partnership with grief.  We are still at risk of assuming that others grieve like we grieve.  We forget that differences, like our age, or the number of times we have encountered grief, affect how we feel our grief.  Our experience in the dance of loss affects how we show our grief.

Our acquaintance with grief begins in childhood and continues through adolescence.  Friends move away.  We lose pets. Grandparents die.  Painful lessons about life and the passage of time, happening in an order we don’t like, but come to accept as life’s way.  Sometimes loss happens out of order, bringing painful lessons about time cut short.  Sometimes we are children facing the loss of a child, a peer.

I was in junior high school the first time I faced the death of a peer.  He was a year younger than me.  We didn’t go to the same school, or even live in the same town.  We weren’t best friends or extremely close. Perhaps it made a difference that we had become friends on our own.  Our parents didn’t know each other.  Our respective friends didn’t know each other.  I met him during the summer when I visited my grandparents.  We rode horses together, talking about incidentally important teenage topics.  At the end of the summer he stayed in the country, I went back to the city.  And then the news came that he had killed himself, with a shotgun, over a girl.  He left a note.  “She doesn’t love me anymore.”

I traveled the fifty miles, by myself on a Greyhound bus, to attend his funeral at the local high school. The gymnasium was filled with people from the rural community and beyond.  There were junior high and high school students.  Young people facing the loss of a peer, a death out of order.  I was there to pay my respects to a brief friendship, and perhaps to stand with other teenagers as we each found our voice of grief.

I lost and grieved other peers, all too young to die, as I finished adolescence and stepped into young adulthood.  In the years that followed I have sat with grieving children and teenagers as they found their own way through loss that came too soon, to those too young.  What should we take from young grief? Who should we be to the children and teenagers in our lives who are facing overwhelming and traumatic loss?

We’re used to learning from the wisdom of age and experience.  When children grieve we discover there are things to learn and lessons to be reminded of from the wisdom of innocence.  For the sake of the young let’s remember

  • they are not empty human-like containers who are here but devoid of feelings until they reach the magic age of majority at 18.  Our failure to recognize this means we may be insensitive to the ways their life has been disrupted.
  • not displaying emotion doesn’t mean a child isn’t feeling something.  Are we modeling a variety of ways to express feelings?  Are we respectful of their need to be with us, and to have time alone?  We may fail to acknowledge the hole left in their lives if we assume that silence means there is no hole.
  • they are not adults in smaller bodies.  They are not fully equipped to identify, feel, and express the complex range of emotions related to loss.  We may explain away their emotion by referring to their displays of grief as adolescent drama.  Defining their grief as overstated may allow us to hide our own discomfort with grief in understated ways.  Will we risk being uncomfortable to be with them in these raw moments?
  • they will accommodate us, at their own risk, if they believe we can’t handle shared grief.  If the things they need to say, the questions they need to ask “make” us cry or shut down, they will take care of us by keeping their thoughts and their questions to themselves.  We get to help them know it’s okay to cry, okay to be quiet, okay to step outside.  We get to show them how to grieve, even as grief continues to be our teacher.  It’s not our grieving that harms, but our determination to leave it the unnamed presence in our midst, and children to wrestle with it alone and in hiding.

“Sorrow makes us all children again – destroys all differences of intellect.  The wisest know nothing.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson                                    

Best laid plans…

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The GrowthLines blog is about growing up, becoming a complete person.  Growing up is the process of a lifetime, literally.  Our growth often depends on our willingness to make a change.  It seems only fitting that a blog inviting readers to grow, should be willing to change for growth too.  With that in mind, I hope you will consider joining me in thinking out loud about:

  • conversation by photograph – We’re probably all familiar with, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”  Some say the original quote actually referred to “ten thousand words”.  Either way, we know the power of images to speak.  Bloggers have recognized the benefits of purposeful silence in Silent Sundays, and of using photography in lieu of words in Wordless Wednesdays.  I haven’t chosen a standing title.  I may not hold to a single day.  I do plan to post a single photograph on a weekly basis, sometimes accompanied by a quote.  No explanation or commentary.  A photograph standing on its own.  That’s where you come in.  I hope readers will share their thoughts about the voices and stories in the image.  I’m eager to hear the growing conversation that begins in silence, observation, and thought.
  • a broader view – Since the first week of November, the focus has been on grief and loss.  In the days ahead, the GrowthLines blog will take an expanded look at life and growth by thinking about community, relationships, parenting, and self awareness, to name a few.  I hope you will…, join the conversation by sharing your thoughts on posted topics and by suggesting topics for us to talk about.  (Please keep in mind, it’s not personal if a suggested subject doesn’t become a post topic.)
  • layers of loss – because grief is an intricate part of our experience, we will continue to talk about both the pain of loss and the growth that is possible in our seasons of grief.  I appreciate the courageous fellow strugglers who have taken pain in hand and stepped into this important conversation to the benefit of us all.

Watch for picture, and start the conversation.

Versatile Blogger

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A heart felt “Thank You” to Jen at Step On a Crack…, for nominating the GrowthLines blog for The Versatile Blogger Award.  I began blogging as a way to think out loud with a larger community, outside the therapy room.  To think about the growth that comes from our experiences.  To recognize the incredible resilience of humans.  To highlight the hope to be found even in our darkest moments.

In the process of writing my thoughts, I have encountered an amazing fabric of fellow travelers who push me to listen more closely, think more clearly, and to see the raw beauty in each of us.  Fellow bloggers have expressed that beauty with humor and wit.  With warmth and encouragement.  With agony and longing.  With confusion and uncertainty.  With candor and honesty.

Thank you, Jen, for your continued presence in the blogging world.  Thank you for your willingness to give us a window into the complexity of your relationship with your mother, and your grief over her living, and her dying.  You invite and inspire all of us to engage in honest conversation about our own lives.

According to the requirements of the award I must:

• Nominate 15 other bloggers

• Inform my nominees

• Share 7 random facts about myself

• Thank those who nominated me

• Add a picture of the award to this post

Congratulations Versatile Bloggers!

I am honored to nominate the following blogs for the Versatile Blogger Award:

http://www.thursdaymorningmeditations.wordpress.com – Emerson J. Winchester invites me to think with her every Thursday morning through her writing.  Her meditations push us to think as a springboard to action, as in her recent post , Pop Music Failure (or, A Step in the Wrong Direction).

http://www.creatingyourbeyond.com – Check out this blog on “survivors creating a life beyond Loss and Trauma”.  I found Brenda’s post on self-forgiveness to be insightful.

http://www.findinglifeinadeath.wordpress.com – a rich and poetic blog about the simultaneous dance we do with life and death, loss and change.  The final post of 2011 was especially thought provoking.

http://www.thereinventedlass.wordpress.com – join a fellow blogger at a crossroads with the chance and challenge to reinvent her life.  One view of the crossroads can be found in the Weekly roundup post.

http://www.ptsdawayout.com – a wonderful “voice of experience” resource for people living with complex PTSD.  “Show up empty and experience everything joyfully.”

http://www.fewerforgreater.wordpress.com – Consider fewer possessions for a greater quality of life.  I was intrigued by the most recent post, Pick four people.

http://www.workthedream.wordpress.com – I was delighted to discover this blog about daring to dream your life, and then working the dream.  I was even more delighted to discover that the dream is being worked out in the shadow of one of my favorite places on this earth, The Spanish Twin Peaks near LaVeta, CO.  The indigenous tribes of the area called them Wahatoya, the “breasts of the world”.

http://www.grandfathersky.wordpress.com – Written by “a poet and a dreamer”, asking “Why Life?”  Beautiful photographs and thought provoking posts, such as Walking Between Worlds.

http://www.cocorum.wordpress.com – She’s a seventeen year old thinking beyond her years, and writing her thoughts.  Listen to her in “What’s the point of kindness?”

http://www.katiedodson.wordpress.com – following the musings at the People Always Leave blog, and read Hanging By A Moment

http://www.belleofthecarnival.com – Join the “head clown” at the Cameron family Carnival as she looks at being family yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  Hear her honor her own father’s spirit in A Skier’s Dream

http://www.nidhisays.wordpress.com – Thank you for poetry and prose.  Make sure you read “To a special man…”

http://www.ariannasrandomthoughts.com – Arianna invites us to join her in a discussion of resilience, motivation, and personal development.  She sometimes uses sports as a metaphor for our discoveries about life, as in Press On!  What Rowing Taught Me About Resilience

http://www.anissastein.wordpress.com – an interesting blog about “living the life less traveled”, which includes among other topics, “Mistakes introverts make”.

http://ashleycherie.wordpress.com – Another young, talented artist who is letting the blogging community join her as she “paints” her thoughts with words.  I appreciate her candid thinking in Recap: 2011.

Congratulations again to my Versatile Blogger nominees! 

Now for the seven random facts about me:
  1. I have lived long enough that after years of wearing glasses and contacts, I now have 20/20 vision to see anything within 18 inches of the end of my nose.  Since I love to read, write, and “google”, all of which fall within the 18 inch range, I’m ecstatic.  Anything past the magical 18 inches is a blur, including the glasses I took off in my moment of “clarity”.  On more than one occasion I’ve had to put in contacts in order to find where I left my glasses.
  2. I too am a “one-sneezer”, and sometimes pretty loud.  I am occasionally embarrassed when a sneeze refuses to be stifled.  On the heels of nearly every sneeze I have a memory moment of my grandad.  Our sneezing behaviors are identical, which means my sneezes are often followed by a smile.
  3. I grew up watching my Dad work on cars, literally a “shade tree mechanic”.  Later, with the luxury of a garage, he taught me how to maintain and repair my first car, a 66 Mustang.  I spent years worth of happy moments in that garage getting my hands dirty and my heart filled.  Some of my hardest moments were being there alone, packing up the remains of my shade tree mechanic dad, when dementia made it necessary for him to move to a nursing home.  Sometimes I go to my own garage and hold his socket wrench in my hand for old time’s sake.
  4. When I was old enough to know better, I left my grandad’s horse grazing in the yard while I went to get a drink of water.  In less than five minutes, Old Red had caught the saddle horn on the clothesline wire, and was racing around the yard in a panic dragging one of my grandmother’s new iron clothesline poles behind him.  The other pole was bent to the ground.  I had to wait for grandad to come home so I could look into his clear, blue eyes, and explain what had happened.  I had to live knowing I had destroyed something my grandma had waited for, for years.  Red and I both survived the experience, him with a small cut over one eye and me with a better understanding of responsibility, and that it takes less than five minutes for things to “go to hell in a handbasket”.  My grandparents kept on loving and investing in me in spite of my mistakes…, priceless.
  5. I like hiking with a camera and a sketch pad.
  6. I’ve been to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival every year since Hurricane Katrina.  If I could rewind my life, I would shake the limitations of a “no dancing” religious code, and learn to do the Zydeco.  The next best thing is to be at the Fais Do Do stage watching a mass of people dancing zydeco to live music.
  7. I love Vivian Higginbotham’s seafood gumbo, and am so glad she gave me her recipe and taught me how to make it before she died.

 

The language of loss

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There are a handful of books in my library that I decided to buy before I knew much about the contents, because the title was intriguing.  One of those is Steve DeShazer’s Words Were Originally Magic.  I thought of the title again when I decided to write about “the language of loss”.  I discovered that DeShazer’s title was inspired by these words.

“Words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power. By words one person can make another blissfully happy or drive him to despair.”     Sigmund Freud

I don’t know that the language of loss is magical, but it is powerful.  It has the power to heal, to offer respite, to comfort.  It also has the power to confuse, to limit, and at its worst to harm.  Language is at the center of the things we tell ourselves, how we think out loud with others, how we experience this life. The words and phrases we use are like the weft and warp on a loom that determine the pattern and texture of the fabric.  I wonder how the fabric of our grief might look if we wove it with a different language.  Would it comfort us to know that our experience and expression of grief is not a sign of craziness, but a richly woven fabric of our common journey?

I have sat with many people over the years in moments of grief, but I can only speak with certainty from my own.  I can’t say “closure” or “saying good-bye” are a help to me if they mean I will come to an end of grief, that I will be done with who I lost.  If my job in grieving is to finish, and to finish means to end the relationship,…well, I’m going to avoid that finish line at all costs.  I have no intention of being done with those I’ve lost.  But what if our relationships are not bound by time and space.  What if our grief is not about the end of relationship, but about how relationships change when death comes.

In the movie Shenandoah, Charlie Anderson, played by Jimmy Stewart, is a widower trying to keep family and home together in the midst of the Civil War.  Charlie often visits the family gravesite to talk with his dead wife Martha.  He tells her about the children and the war.  He asks her questions and shares his thoughts.  These private, intimate moments between Charlie and Martha assure us that our relationships continue beyond death.  In the midst of the sadness and pain of loss, Charlie Anderson also finds comfort and the strength to continue.  Even in death, Martha remains his partner for the journey.

When we don’t talk about death, we are at risk of believing that our experience of death is not only unique, but may be evidence that we’re crazy.  We may worry that our ongoing involvement with our loved one means we’re “stuck” in our grief.  We may also worry about what it means when some of our memory seems to be slipping away.  Sometimes we can remember details of a person’s hands, can hear their voice, can see them moving, but their face begins to fade.  I don’t know what it means that we can often call to mind so much about someone we love, while their face becomes a blurry, veiled image.  If our eyes are windows to our soul, perhaps a face that fades in our mind is a reminder that our relationship is no longer defined by a physical body, but now fills the universe.

If we are going to discuss death, we need language.  But experiencing loss and death is not the same thing as the language we use to describe it.  Language can be concrete and limiting.  Loss continues to remind us that it will not be bound by a word.  That it is often gray and messy.  Don’t be afraid of the language of loss.  It’s the willingness to speak our loss into words that creates a language of possibility rather than limitation.

“We’re fascinated by the words–but where we meet is in the silence behind them”
                                                                                                                 -Ram Dass