I.
Perhaps
this is the first time
you’ve had to make sense
of loss.

Maybe,
you are
unfamiliar
with grief.

This could be
the first time
you’ve cried
in the middle of the day.

It is not my first time.

II.
When the things you thought were important
don’t matter,
They don’t matter.

And if avoiding your experience
becomes limited to screens,
existential meaning
might be more difficult to hide from.

Can you stop moving long enough
to consider mortality,
or become alchemy.

To help and heal
who and what
needs help and healing.

There are unlimited ways
to avoid uncomfortable feelings.

What if we didn’t.

III.
Befriending your shadow
is a brave thing to do.

Forcing uncomfortable feelings out the door
before they’re ready,
is a disservice.

Don't waste this opportunity
to let grief do its job.
Feelings are facilitators,
to move open your heart.
They need space to rest,
to settle and dissolve
They are children asking for your attention,
wanting to be fully seen
by you.

Welcome them home.

Patience, a new commodity.
Projection reaches expiration.

The feelings we’re afraid of, call us.
They are
the antidote.

We are the antidote.

IV.
I walk laps
around the edge of a harvested corn field.
I walk alone,
but I’m not really alone.
I am with the birds and spring noises.
The trees, water and dried grasses.
I am with the sky, the breeze,
the bugs and rodents I can’t see.

The birds and squirrels behave like normal,
make the same sounds as normal.

They do not care how we feel.

We forget
that life does not care about our problems.

I read that a New Yorker
saw the stars for the first time,
because of less air pollution.
That fish and dolphins swim in newly clear rivers.
I wonder what the earth can do
while we are away.

V.
We move outside our comfort zone
in ways that are uncomfortable
and stressful.
I hope we reflect
enough

process our grief
enough

to reprioritize.

my light is your light,
my darkness, your darkness
How obvious it is, that
we are all
the same energy.

I hope,
we draw on the best of human nature

What are we going to do about it?
What are we going to do about it?

I hope we draw
on the best
of human nature.