Walk With Me

My posture toward “seeing the good” used to be grounded in only seeing the good as good and the bad as bad. I could never make the connection of seeing goodness by looking through that lens of loss. Until life in many ways became dark. When life became only about loss. I believe part of the reason loss is so particularly hard is because we spend much of our lives straining to look through the lens of gains. Whether it be a job status or title, the amount of kids or cars, the number of degrees on our wall. And look, all of those things are not inherently bad. But, what happens when our being, our foundation is grounded upon everything we achieve and acquire gain? I wonder if that is why our world is struggling so much right now. Is it because we have lost the art of learning how to live in loss? This morning, I pondered what it would be like to live in a time where we still wore black when grieving; to wear black until we felt a time of moving forward in our grief? Part of me absolu

Sometimes I have moments where I feel kind of mad at Dad; mad at him for leaving us. Not long ago, I was having one of those moments. Sulking about how Dad died and then the world went haywire and wishing he were still here. Worrying about family genetics and wondering if this will be my fate too. Then, I heard this song . While I’ve been listening to the Wailin’ Jennys for several years, I had yet to hear their rendition of this folk song ‘Old Churchyard’. I tried to find the origin of this song; I wanted to know the history. Yet, maybe there’s no need to know the history. Maybe, it was solely the need hear these words at the right moment and to feel the grace that came with it. Because standing there in the kitchen, knee deep in canning applesauce and wallowing in the “it’s not fair” of Dad being gone, their succinct harmonies reminded me that while death is so incomprehensible, sometimes we must accept that death simply is. Trust me, I don’t say that and feel much better or th