From the grief of this year rose gratitude. A deep gratitude for my life, for human connection (however brief), for the bond with light and plants and trees and air, with animals, for the hard work and devotion it takes to get out there into the woods, to push myself up rocks and dirt, to move through fear and frustration and laziness, to move beyond what I thought I could ever do – just to see the next field of grass, sunflower, aspen, to look over the wide expanse of the landscape, its history, the sky and earth, the stars, and say, “wow.”
In Ian MacKenzie’s film, Stephen Jenkinson – The Meaning of Death, Jenkinson asks – “What if meaning is not hidden?”
MacKenzie’s article, The Meaning of Death – Stephen Jenkinson, features outtakes from the film that are worth considering.
A few quotes that resonated with me below . . .
. . . a lot of people in the world, ancestrally, knew long ago that that being content or that sense of well-being, that’s a consequence of your willingness to help the world live. That your happiness is actually a corollary—let me change happiness—that your health is a corollary of the health of everything around you.
. . . We use the word crisis to describe something that shouldn’t be or shouldn’t happen. I’m using the word to say the crisis is determined by our unwillingness to know it, that’s what makes it critical. But the world dies to keep us alive. Fortunately not all the world at the same time, at least so far. We’ll see. Or maybe we won’t see.
Grief is the willingness to be claimed by a story bigger than the one you wish for.
What a revolutionary proposition to realize that your heartbrokenness turns out to be the key to your willingness to remember what it takes to be a human being.
To see the whole beautiful article, click here.
Learn more about Stephen’s work at Orphan Wisdom.