'Writing can be a way of straightening out emotional knots, a way of achieving balance in our lives so that a sense of well-being emerges. Within each of us there exists a “self-righting” mechanism. Just as surely as a plant will turn toward the light, our creative imagination helps us recreate ourselves.'
Hi Marcus
This article reminds my of one of your first posts I remember- using the pencil as an app.
Thanks for reminding us of this powerful healing tool!
Sue
https://www.brainline.org/story/waves-grief
"Waves of Grief"
BrainLine, Nicole Bingaman
'Grief is never the friend that you want to invite to sit on your porch, take a long walk with, or talk to endlessly about your hopes ..."
"When I can’t speak of my sadness, and yet it is filling every portal of my brain, I write. I write a letter to myself, just as I would a friend. I write a letter to the “old” Taylor, telling him what happened. Or I sit down and make a list of every single emotion I am feeling, and I own it for what it is"
The moments when I was allowed to share my grief with honour for I did indeed need to honour this process of loss of baby, loss of self. Not just my emotional state "as a part of my stroke" the energy and effort which went into protecting myself until I found the right way for me to unload, to find someone who simply listened and heard me, not put a label on me, not diagnose, not suggest what I wasn't ready for - was just with me. Until that time I read whatever I could find on grief that soothed me and understood me. I read and I wrote.
C.S. Lewis - A Grief Observed had lots of quotes which I devoured.
“For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?
But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?
How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
"I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
The poetic honest writing of C.S. Lewis is a style which I find very soothing.
Hi Sue,
I love those quotes!
I will try to find this book because this is what I felt and still feeling, the lost of my identity from the stroke, heart attack, cardiac arrest ....
I hope this grief goes back to a dark part in the forest, yet it is still sitting next to me. Headspace has a good session on this, grief.
Marcus