Sometimes You Just Gotta Be There...

     Today, I find myself in deep contemplation about life, and friends, and losses...but also about comforts, and joy, and the beauty of the human spirit.  I seem to have several friends who are experiencing very difficult and trying times in their lives right now...some are experiencing the losses that come with Multiple Sclerosis, some are experiencing changing relationships, and still others are experiencing the memories of the loss of loved ones.  A few of these friends are acquainted with one another and still others are many miles across the United States and even the world.  None are aware of the heartache the others have shared with me...I am the common denominator between these friends as they share their sorrows and grief.

     I am once again reminded how resilient the human spirit is and how sacred is the bond of friendship.  I am blessed to know these individuals as friends and feel such privilege to be allowed glimpses into their most deepest places of feeling.  Although saddening to be an observer of their utter turmoil, I am still quite honored.  Because I am not a part of the mystery they are discovering, I can easily hold a place for them, be a listening ear, and lend a shoulder for tears...a position I hold as sacred in the act of friendship.

     I pray I may never lose sight of ALL of the life around me...that I never become so self-absorbed in my own world of MS or hardship that I can no longer hear the cries of others or feel the hands of those needing my grasp.  I pray I can always be to my friends and loved ones what they have always meant to me.

     One of my dearest friends who reads this rambling blog religiously recently shared with me a piece of their grief and darkness with me.  The exchange reminded me of a Rainer Maria Rilke poem...the very poem another dear friend shared while walking beside ME during a period of my own grief:

It's possible I am pushing through solid rock

In flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;

I am such a long way in I see no way through,

And no space:  everything is close to my face,

And everything close to my face is stone.

 

I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief—

So this massive darkness makes me small.

YOU be the master:  make yourself fierce, break in:

Then your great transforming will happen to me,

And my great grief cry will happen to you.