Through the Shadowlands

How does one properly frame the one question we’ve managed to avoid until it quietly poses itself to us inside our thinking? The question of how we’ll feel when we lose a rare human being from our life?

With that, comes an understanding, that such a loss will be for the rest of our life. Big question, small life in the scheme of things! But it’s a question anyone who has ever been very well loved in their life-time faces.

And regardless of what or in whom we believe outside of ourselves, the realisation that we’re not actually in charge, never have been in fact, somehow bypasses any rote response we might have by posing it so judiciously in the first place. Quietly that is, as to be completely disarming.

It occurred to me that at the source of any stream, the water is clear, and in the same way, at the source of the question there’s no confusion, nor ambiguity in how we might answer it finally. I find that heartening.

It’s quiet approach strips us of our bravado too before we can muster it, levels a compassionate eye to ours, bypassing our intellect to hammer lightly on the door of our heart. It’s a tenacious question, I’ll give it that.

Joy: “There’s nothing like dying to make you realise you’re not in charge.”
C.S. Lewis: “Yes there is. Loving someone does that too.”

When C.S. Lewis faced losing someone he really wanted to stay in communication with (the loss of his mother and his wife Joy), he wrote. As I do. He found words to say. As I do. As all of us who know where the words grow do.

They say that a picture paints a thousand words and I say a thousand well-crafted words will speak to an anguished soul as well. How? Through shared humanity. Why? Out of love and for comfort and because life moves. And so we may experience living purposely again. Out the other side, having passed through the shadowlands.
Special Thanks to Evan

The VIDEO

This is 2 of 4 blogs around the same subject: 3. Beyond the Shadowlands 4. Where the Wild Things Are 1. Shadowlands