November 1 2021
Monday, November 1, 2021
This month our theme is “Grace and Gratitude.” I often say that grief and gratitude are two sides of the same coin – when we lose what we’re grateful for we grieve. So where does that leave grace? In her book, Singing Beyond Sorrow: A Year of Grief, Gratitude and Grace,” Carole Marie Downing shares her journal entries from the year following her husband’s death. In the introduction she writes, “Each and every moment of a year has passed, filled with grief or filled with gratitude, and what flows in and out of all those moments is grace—the inexplicable awareness that there is something greater within these moments that weaves them into one larger tapestry of life.” This month we’ll explore these concepts of grief, grace and gratitude.
Previous Posts
December 11 2023
I wasn’t always comfortable with the concept of, “Dare! Silence.” I grew up in a house with five kids and two parents, so silence was not something that happened often. When I began to practice a s...
December 4 2023
This month’s theme is “Dare! Silence.” Silence is very important throughout our lives, especially on our grief journeys. Silence can be intimidating, and we often try to fill it when we encounter i...
November 27 2023
To close this month, please read Anne Hillman’s poem, “We Look With Uncertainty” as you notice “something new is being born in” you while making new treasured memories.
We look with uncertainty
be...
November 20 2023
My favorite holidays is Thanksgiving. In terms of the meanings behind other holidays, I’m all in. But I can do without their hype and commercialization. So as we approach the Thanksgiving holiday, ...
November 13 2023
As I was writing this month’s posts about our theme of “Memories Become Treasures,” the song “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac started to play. When our youngest child went off to college, this song mad...
November 6 2023
This month’s theme is “Memories Become Treasures.” In a recent grief education and support group I was leading we talked about looking at old photographs of deceased loved ones and how those pictur...
October 30 2023
To close out this month, read these words of poet John O'Donohue:
The dead are not distant or absent. They are alongside us. When we lose someone to death, we lose their physical image and presenc...
October 23 2023
In the book, A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis wrote:
“And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than memory; an i...
October 16 2023
In connection with our theme, “I Am Gone but Very Near,” I’ve recently learned that in the Aramaic language, the word death means “existing elsewhere.” For some people, the death of a loved one mea...
October 9 2023
Nathasha Wagner once said, "I had to learn to have a relationship with someone who wasn’t there anymore." That can feel like an impossible feat, but grief shows us how. When listening to grief, mou...
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