We, my friends, have been living very intense lives for a long time. We have been caring for Val and for each other, and searching for beauty and meaning, and falling down and getting up again. There were many fast big events, and then a great slow fall; and now we are all dispersed, curled up in our own corners with our sore and hopeful hearts.
And I find myself wondering what you are all thinking. How you are going about your newly reconfigured lives.
Val wanted so much for this — her dying, her living, our community around that — to be beautiful. I am thinking a lot these days about how to carry that beauty forward, how to be bold and brave and crazy and beautiful in my own grief and my own life. I hope to write more about this to figure it out for myself and express it more for others. Or maybe I will take photos, or make quilts, or paint on stones. Maybe I will talk to strangers and gather stories. I don’t know. I just know that I want to keep striving to live all the way up to the edges, and keep pushing out.
I am still in a rare and tender state, a long moment of wild instability and possibility. Maybe you are too. I’m guessing you are. And I want to nurture that. Instead of fizzling out in our lonesome corners, I wonder if maybe we can keep sparking one another’s creativity / illuminating each other’s grief / inspiring one another’s life-experimentation by thinking out loud in a shared space. Another kind of salon for us, the scathed.
So how does this work? I’m not sure yet. This is an experiment. But here are the ideas in my head of where we could start:
Any of us can make a post. (Contact me to set you up as an author, or I can post for you as a guest blogger. You don’t have to post; you can also sign up just to follow the blog.) Conversation could happen in the comments (or between posts or of course out here in the world). The posts do not have to be polished and spectacular: I’m thinking of this place as a workshop and salon and conversation and think tank and test kitchen. A place to stir things up and try things out.
The posts could be: Writing. Photos. Other kinds of art. Videos. Links. Poems we find meaningful. Those of us who are already writing/creating about this stuff in another venue are welcome to cross-post things here.
What the posts could be about:
The grief experience: How are you feeling? How are you getting through the day? What’s hard? What’s easy? What surprises you about this? What’s beautiful about it? What are you scared of? What do you need? How has your life changed?
Val. What do you love about her? How do you miss her today? How has she influenced your living? What made her remarkable to you? Or Val stories.
Searching for meaning or connection: What meaning has this experience, or parts of this experience, held for you? Where do you find your grief taking you? How has this experience changed you? How do you want it to keep changing you?
Other stuff: Ideas you are thinking about. Things you’ve been inspired to try. Questions you’d like to pose for discussion. How you are pursuing beauty/joy/creativity.
These are just examples. I am interested to see what happens. I am interested in cross-pollination. Maybe this can be a place where we can tell some stories together.
Love,
Deborah
many shiny crows 