Grief and Praise

Human life is impossible. It is so complex, daunting, demanding and exasperating. It is amazing that most of us make it through it. Life is also miraculous. I wonder just as often, about how it could be as poignant as painful? There is so much beauty, compassion, joy, and outright celebration. It is mind-boggling, that both are so vivid, and present at any given moment.

I can’t help but be impressed, though at times I’m just as chagrined.

I want to write about grief and praise, about how they seem to come together, about how they are the same thing.  I’m sure I don’t have the words to capture this deeply mysterious phenomenon, but I feel compelled to try. Life would not be Life if it did not contain this perplexing quality, and I am alive, and want to be fully alive while I’m here. So, this mysterious and beguiling feature of existence captures my attention.

Here’s a secret I’ve never told. I laugh and I cry when I have a very powerful orgasm. I’ve had the experience enough now (I’ve been fortunate) so that I can describe it, and how my relationship with it has morphed over the years. At first, I thought about it as revealing some unsavory demented part of me. I didn’t want it to happen. It almost turned me off from lovemaking. Happily, I’m a guy, and that feeling didn’t last very long. Still, I’ve kept it a secret, because I couldn’t reconcile the hilarity I felt, with the forlorn feeling that also overcame me. I was torn, so much so, and so predictably, that I came (so to speak) to relate to these experiences as like being thrown into an ocean of feelings.

In my later years, I began to realize that I was indeed falling into an ocean of feelings. It existed somewhere beneath, or above, my awareness. I don’t know to this day if it is an ocean of unfelt feelings, or if it’s the feelings that reflect the way things are. I know I go there now, more knowingly, bereft but joyous, shrunken into a smallness I can hardly comprehend, and lifted somehow.  It is a death I cannot deny, and a birth that scalds me with a strange elation. I relish it and fear it. It is mine and it is not mine.

Anyway, what has this got to do with grief and praise? I don’t know, but something in my experience makes clear to me, that two seemingly opposite feelings can coexist as one. My experience of grief constantly threatens to overwhelm me. I rue my own awareness. The world is a vail of tears! It hurts just to be alive, and it hurts even more, if one tries to be more alive. Humankind is some kind of demonic miracle, so violent and insensitive, while so vulnerable and loveable.  One cannot say enough good about us, and one cannot say enough about our carelessness and cruelty.

I marvel that some beings had enough awareness to realize that grief and praise both arise out of the same place. Just as orgasm breaks me open, so  does grief and praise. I can go either way, and I end up in the same feeling state. There is no protection. Oh, I could neglect this portion of reality, but if I do so, I lose my passport to truly being here, human, alive, and really present.

More than my heart is opened. How is that possible? In essence, it takes my whole being to actively grieve what I’m experiencing. What collapses in me with the weight of grief, grows my perception of the exquisite beauty of everything, passing so quickly, illuminating the world. I am enlivened by what drags me down, and lifts me up. I feel a pervasive vulnerability that binds me to all things, I am essentially grown by a dual-awareness of unity.

This kind of illumination awaits me, all I have to do is really take stock of my existence. I don’t know about you, but I am a pretty broken guy. I am old, disabled, sometimes forgetful, afraid of how little control I have, totally dependent and often overwhelmed. Somehow the Universe has conspired to make my imperfection, like yours, perfect. I think that calls for grief and praise.