“Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.”
– Henry David Thoreau
I have to say that I’ve been in denial about this post for some time. Avoiding it like the plague. Endeavouring to keep my self safe. I should be happy shouldn’t I?? I felt like taking a restraining order out against my psyche and yet Sacred Sorrow seems to be burning a glowing branding iron into my soul. Encounters with people, places, books, movies, myself keep it in the forefront of my mind.
I first became aware of this concept about ten tears (freudian slip or what?) years ago when I granted it visitation rights to my soul. It manifested as a poem.
Keeper of the Sacred Sorrow
From how many lifetimes
Has this holy melancholy
Followed me.
Where is it taking me,
Past and future
Wrapped up in the now?
I make a vow
To follow my heart.
Why has this arrived
To be reconciled?
Where will it lead?
What might it heal
Without knowledge of the wrong
Being righted?
As my soul is laid bare
I gaze upon its naked form
With love.
I see it glowing warm
With the embers of learning.
Knowing that as I perceive the love within
So I can perceive the love without
In the other who is myself.
A choice is no choice when I live in fear,
No choice is a choice when I live with care.
Within that fear I ask a humble why?
Care creates unclouded sky.
This occurred a couple of years after I was gripped by a serious grieving process following the ending of a relationship. I was barely functioning for months. Work at the time was all I could manage. At seemingly random moments I’d be stricken, waves of grief washing up on my shore. Tears arriving from my as yet uncharted depths. Emotions welling up. I’d imagined previously that maybe I’d had some deeper connection to life and here was an indication that perhaps there was an element of superficiality to my existence. It pushed me further into areas I hoped would answer the questions this grief had posed to me. Counselling, psychotherapy, shamanic practices, life-coaching.
So why at this time have I become acutely aware of sorrow and sadness again? I have narrowed it down to three or four ideas that are present for me: powerlessness, man’s inhumanity to man and his fellow beings; the perception that I’m not in a place or job that is nourishing to my soul’s evolution; and possibly the reopening of what is termed the sacred wound. It is not a grieving process but probably indicative of something amiss in my psyche. Am I once again living at the surface of my psyche rather than exploring the depths.
Seems a good opportunity to explore those concepts in the following posts.
Blessings
