As autumn is here, I find myself revisiting a thought I’ve had many times throughout my life. What is balance, and how do I actually find it?
When I’m stuck, I tend to look to nature for wisdom. The fall equinox holds a special place in my heart, coming just after my birthday, and in my younger years, it marked the first month of a new school year.
I always felt that the new year should begin during Autumn, partially because it was my new year. It was full of possibilities. I have never felt that same spark in January when the New Year is celebrated, much the opposite if I’m being honest.
I thought this feeling would shift as I got older, put my days of school behind me, though it hasn’t yet, and I cannot imagine a day that it could.
As I’ve grown older, the resonance has deepened significantly. It is a time for harvest, meeting the light and the dark with equal regard, and discovering what that means for nature around me as well as my own internal and unique nature.
I’ve briefly shared that this is a time of great change in my life. With my 27th birthday passing, I find myself grieving in ways I hadn’t expected to at this point in my life.
With an engagement ending, my health struggling, my career lagging, and the death of a dear friend and family member, grief meets me in continuously new ways.
Being surrounded by grief, it is so easy to become lost and stagnant—life has dealt blow after blow—but it is also a time of personal transformation.
I must sit with the darkness of grief and learn what it has to teach me, while also planting the seeds of what my new life will be.
Sitting inside the labyrinth of suffering, I was reminded of a piece of wisdom many before have met:
“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her name was grief.”
— Unknown
When Grief Reveals Itself
The boundaries of love, anger, and grief are thin. In each feeling and moment within them, we see they are not strangers, not even friends, but kin.
Likewise, the equinox is a time when every boundary thins. The earth still births the fruits of our summer labours, as death billows down in the cascading red and orange of fall’s decay.
As I approach the day of my birth and share it with my longest friend on the day of his funeral, I am forced to also sit in the duality of liminal times.
Like most things, love does not end in the face of death; it changes shape. Sometimes it appears as anger. Anger toward the universe for its theft of life, or your loved one, in their ultimate abandonment.
Each is an expected aspect of grief, and grief is always love, confused as to where to pour itself when the body you loved is gone.
But there is power in this, the power of knowing that love will always overcome, outsmart, and conquer death. We must find new passages for the everlasting love we all have inside to pour freely outward.
At first, I was angry that on every birthday, I would have to remember such an immense loss. But as I dug deeper and revealed to myself the love that hid below, I began to feel the sacredness.
Sharing birthdays with my cousin was not a new idea, as it had been how I spent most birthdays as a child. Though his birthday fell in April, it was not hard to find the many pictures of us sitting on the same chair as he helped me blow out my candles.
Birthdays have always been sacred to me, but I felt no resentment in sharing my moments with him, as children often do.
I thought I would hold off on my birthday celebrations this year, focus on him and my grief. However, as the equinox approached, I realized that life and death have always coexisted.
There was no better way to say goodbye than to share this day with my beloved cousin once again.
As I blew out my candles and closed my eyes, I allowed myself to sink into the love that still exists between our two souls.
His body may be gone, but in those moments, I feel the love we share as real and present as it has ever been.
Now, when grief rages around me, I am reminded of what nature teaches. Light and dark, life and death, exist beside and within one another.
—
Previously Published on substack
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