Daily Archives: May 5, 2015

Wisdom From The Ancients

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Seneca writes:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!

The Power of Grieving, The Power of Time

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I’m pretty sure that all of us have experienced sadness, but I really don’t know if all of us have experienced grief.

I’m talking about that helpless rage that is so great it is calm, so empty that you have never felt so full, and so sticky it seems you can never be expiated.

It comes from the loss of something or someone you were not designed to lose.

You do realise that, don’t you?  Human beings were not designed to experience this sort of relational loss.

Loss is the result of something else that happened to creation due to the way free will was/is decided to be used.

But as with all forms of fracture, God is faithful to bring forth creative answers and counter-creations, in all Their faithful infiniteness…They always have a beauty that will come to you and weld with you and in you, and though the fracture is never “not have happened”, it is somehow made beautiful.

This.

This is the hope, and the glory of God.  They are faithful, each and every time, if you will be patient, hold on, and keep your heart open.

  1. All This F-ing Time and I Still Feel Grief.  You think, “All this f-ing time and I still feel this grief?” And your body is saying “Yes. Yes, you do.”

    unconditionedconsciousness:

    I’m going to take this from you
    but give this to you instead:
    more space, cleansing tears,
    better questions, compassion,
    pathways to the center,
    maps to deeper wells,
    less distractions,
    blankets of darkness,
    little pools of light under your skin
    where he touched you
    but will never touch you again,
    and holes in your heart
    that nothing but pure love can fill.

    ~ McCall Erickson