Hello I see your pain

We celebrate happiness as the holy grail, and in so doing, we make the emotional scale of human life wrong.

Can we hold happiness and grief simultaneously? 

It is impossible to sit with someone living in the grip of an existential crisis or deep depression and hold the space for their range of emotions without having been into the depths of our own grief. Was our grief wrong when it gives us access to the fullness of our humanity, to our ability to be compassionate?

Our Instagram feed shows bright, shiny happy people, living a perfect life. The message reinforces that anything that is not this, is wrong.

To hold happiness as the aspiration is to deny the range of life.

On days like this, when so many parts of our home planet are tearing each other apart, where privilege denies minorities the same opportunities they have, where cruelty and anger roil through the air like an emotional tsunami, we might question how we can allow the full scale of our emotions to be fully acceptable.

This does not mean we have the right to project our anger on others. 

We can rage, rage against wrong. We can fall to the Earth and weep to the bones of our existence for the horror we perpetrate on our precious Earth and her creatures. We can be broken down in the face of injustice.

And

We can marvel at the sunrise. Delight in the bird song. Laugh wildly with our lover about silly things.

All of this is what makes us human. 

Hello, I see your pain. I can hold it today. Perhaps tomorrow you might be able to hold mine.

Photo Taken October 19th  2023