After Tamara's death I attended over Zoom... it was still the pandemic... a grief writing group - Moving from Grief to Life. The session was organized by the very wonderful Susan Kapadia
and run by the caring Ciena Rose William. Each week we were given a prompt and had ten minutes to write. If we wanted we could read what we wrote to the group.
One week we had the prompt "where am I from".
I thought I knew where I was from, a hamlet in Hampstead, London, behind the Spaniards Inn where a highway robber used to demand "your money or your life".
But that's not really where I'm from. I'm from the earth. I'm from the wild all around me, and only now am I connecting to that place, to the planet.
Grief gives a new awareness and connects me through love to the earth. My love lived naturally in nature, now I get to learn what she just knew... that nature is god.
It's the eagle that flew above her broken body on the rocks below. It's butterflies that live one day and are gone the next. It is the proud oaks of Ojai that stand tall and long as generations come and go.
Grief is eternal love, and there is no boundary between death, life, and love in nature.