at a loss

dreams of loss

They happen quite often for me.

It can be dreams where I’ve lost something tangible, like my wallet, for instance.

Or perhaps I’ve lost my way and am trying to get back on the path.

Occasionally, I’ve even lost my footing and have that unsettling falling feeling that jerks me awake.

Although, most often, I dream that I have no quiet space or privacy and I am eagerly searching for a place, any place in the oddness of the dream world, to find solitude.

You don’t have to have a Jungian certificate in dream analysis to see what is going on in those dreams.

But what am I looking for in my waking life that compels my sleeping self to create these nightly searches.  Looking for that which is lost and cannot be found?

a poet's take on loss

Poet and philosopher, David Whyte, says that half of all human experience is mediated through loss and disappearance.  He ponders:

“if you have a really fierce loss, the loss of someone who’s close to you, the loss of a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a friend, God forbid a child — then human beings have every right to say,

Listen, God. If this is how you play the game, I’m not playing the game. I’m not playing by your rules. I’m going to manufacture my own little game, and I’m not going to come out of it. I’m going to make my own little bubble. And I’m going to draw up the rules. And I’m not coming out to this frontier again. I don’t want to. I want to create insulation. I want to create distance.”

 

 

 

considering loss

How do I create that distance in my life?  How do I fill my moments to enable me to avoid the conversation with myself about those painful disappearances?  About those deep vulnerabilities and the big and even little losses?

How challenging it is to turn off and turn away from the numbing distractions and look into those dark, vulnerable places where I genuinely live in a life where half of it involves some kind of loss.

• Can I notice that what I hope for is not always what can be and not despair?
• Can I despair and not close my eyes, my heart, my skin to the groaning discomfort?
• Can I acknowledge the inevitably of my own demise and of those closest to me, without shutting down or numbing out?

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.”

Here’s to finding the courage to look into the dark eyes of loss and bravely return its unwavering gaze.

 (Check out Krista Tippet’s conversation with David Whyte at On Being)