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Significant Quotes


mfh

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This is a favorite book of mine ~ 

"We grieve the loves we’ve lost. We grieve our abilities vanishing through illness or age. We grieve the loss of faith in our religion. We grieve our children leaving home. We grieve the paths we didn’t walk. We grieve the family we never had. We grieve the suffering of the planet. But while grief may look like an expression of pain that serves no purpose, it is actually the soul’s acknowledgment of what we value. Grief is the honour we pay to that which is dear to us. And it is only through the connection to what we cherish that we can know how to move forward. In this way, grief is motion.

Yet in our culture, we are deeply unskilled with grief. We hold it at a distance as best we can, both in ourselves and in each other, treating it as, Joanna Macy says, like “an enemy of cheerfulness.” There is unspoken shame associated with grief. It is sanctioned in very few places, in small doses, for exceptional occasions such as death and tragedy. Beyond that, it can feel dangerous and weak. Perhaps because we fear we’ll drown in our despair, or because it means falling apart in a world which values ‘holding it together’ above all else. But grief plays an essential role in our coming undone from previous attachments. It is the necessary current we need to carry us into our next becoming. Without it, we may remain stuck in that area of our life, which can limit the whole spectrum of our feeling alive."

Toko-pa Turner, excerpt from “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home” (belongingbook.com)

Artwork by Inhyuk Jo (https://www.facebook.com/joinhyuk)

by Jo Inhyuk.jpg

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"When we are thrust into exile, we are suddenly flooded with the backlog of unfelt feeling. This is why it can seem like one heartbreak joins with every other heartbreak you’ve ever felt in one mass of insurmountable grief. And though we may want nothing more than to distance ourselves from it, I believe we are being offered a chance, through the opening grief makes in us, to rehabilitate the relationship to our instinctual creativity. In exile, away from the hungry mouths and grabby hands that crowd in on our lives, we have a chance to come into conversation with our wild self again."

Toko-pa Turner, excerpt from “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home” (belongingbook.com)

Artwork by Lucy Campbell

37416570_2497970296883628_7153043134115479552_n.jpg

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That's a good opener for my Grief Support Group today!  Thank you, Anne, for always finding jewels for us.  

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Today I found myself rereading several chapters of this book today...

“There is really only one way to restore a world that is dying and in disrepair: to make beauty where ugliness has set in. By beauty, I don’t mean a superficial attractiveness, though the word is commonly used in this way. Beauty is a loveliness admired in its entirety, not just at face value. The beauty I’m referring to is metabolized grief. It includes brokenness and fallibility, and in so doing, conveys for us something deliciously real. Like kintsukuroi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold, what is normally seen as a fatal flaw is distinguished with value. When we come into contact with this kind of beauty, it serves as a medicine for the brokenness in ourselves, which then gives us the courage to live in greater intimacy with the world’s wounds.” 
 Toko-pa TurnerBelonging: Remembering Ourselves Home.

Japanese art.jpg

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I'll take that as a message straight from George to me.  ;)

 

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