Good Grief
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Beginning Again, and Again (Revised)
"A visitor's witnessing"
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Someone told me they've quit drinking seventeen times. "Eighteen starts tomorrow." They laughed but weren't joking. This is what beginning again looks like - admitting the last beginning didn't take.
Knowledge holders carry methods not answers. Like having recipes but no ingredients, instructions but no tools. They investigate what needs birthing. Midwifing ideas that don't want to be born. Helping communities include the harm that was caused. Making room at tables for uncomfortable truths.
Most rituals acknowledge something. Cosmic accounting I don't understand. Shadow withheld when brightness came. The receipt for light is darkness. Grief waited at edges while love took center stage. Patient as understudies who know the lead will fall.
Grief overflows every container. Like trying to Marie Kondo trauma. Thinking you can frame it, contain it? Like organizing the ocean into file folders. Won't work.
Violation enables fresh starts. Not punishment but weather patterns. This allows beginning again. Humans growing familiar with starting over. New year's resolutions in October. Monday as weekly resurrection. Even ceremonial forms crack so life can grow. Traditions breaking so truth can breathe.
We leave grief behind thinking connection risks trust. Like emotional credit scores we're protecting. Something needs forgiving for movement. Maybe forgiveness just means letting rivers flow where they want.
Someone died and saw what death means to love. I don't understand this but feel it matters. Bodies protect by closing. Careful accounting of old wounds. Feel if we forgive we betray ourselves. The body keeps receipts for every hurt.
But bodies need healing to create. Moving from fortress to garden, bunker to dance floor. Creative force developing through wounds not despite them. Scar tissue stronger than original skin.
Under innocent spiritual goodness, beginning again isn't failure. It's the most honest thing we do. Each betrayal, grief, forgiveness - they're doors. Some open, some close, some revolve eternally.
Witnessing how you practice beginning. Delete dating apps. Redownload. Delete again. Not because you failed but because that's what living things do. They begin, and begin, and begin.
Still learning starting over might be the point. Still discovering everyone's on their third lifetime in this one body. Still witnessing courage in Monday morning's coffee.
