
Aching Heart – February 20th

In the face of this deeply painful world, to carry on with fullness requires grief.
In the face of our deeply tragic stories, to hold ourselves with love requires tears.
In the face of an elder-less culture, to initiate ourselves with depth requires community .
In the face of our death phobic culture, to sit with our dying requires vulnerability.
Expressed grief cuts through the madness of the world both without and within, leaving us naked and alive. Only true grief, to me, can do this, for true grief is pure, held, non-judgmental and shared by all.
To grieve is the most deeply human act we can undertake, because it allows new life to flow and brings our power to the world.
Only when I allow my heart to die and be broken open can I truly love fully.
(H.K.P) Harry Kloser Pitcher, Harry Edgar Pitcher
Become a person. Make beauty out of grief. Become real people who might have untenable rotten
ideas, but who in the end grow into solid old people who are generous and unconniving, people who
know things and don’t just see everything as a business opportunity.
Be courageous, make your hate into
an art of love beyond your wants, and stop sending undigested grief in the form of sorrow frozen into hate
into the arms of the future. Hand over the world with some modicum of the possibility for peace.
(Martin Prechtel – The Smell of Rain on Dust)
The Aching Heart – finally there is a name. A term that defines what I was missing for so long when I heard about movements encouraging CHANGE! How can change happen without grief? How can anything happen without grief?
I want to write about an experience I recently had – an experience where grief and tears seemed to be displaced and there should be nothing else other than celebration and joy.
Our daugther Rose was born 3 months ago at home, in to candle lit red colors, and to warm welcoming hands. Into a circle of people waiting for her, humming and comforting together with everything she needed. A magical moment.
And yet, two weeks later we went to see our cranio-sacral therapists to offer Rose a session, inviting her to go into her birth experience and express what she was not able to do whilst in the birth canal.
The therapists – a couple, alongside my husband and I, formed a circle around her. We held her with the intention of giving her the quality of the womb she had lived in for the last nine months. And she…. she allowed herself to go into the pain. She went through the final contractions a second time, expressing very soundly what was going on in her. How it was for her to bid goodbye to her monthers heartbeat. And we, we held her, witnessed her, gave her the space she needed.
We didn’t go with the intention of „fixing“ something. We wanted to offer her a room to express and to feel – to experience that it’s ok. That we are here, holding and forming a circle. Seeing this little being in pain took my breath away at times. And, in the end, I held her in my arms again like a newborn.
That quality of newborn-ness is often in me when I allow grief to expand without holding back.
(K.K.P)
When I touch my grief I touch my love.
When I hold what I mourn I caress what I value.
When I uncover my pain I offer my soul.
When my village witnesses me I am human.
(H. Kloser-Pitcher)