Initiation

June 10,2006. Yesterday's trip from Bowling Green to Atlanta found me stranded along with hundreds (thousands?) of other vehicles as we inched down four miles to the bottom of a steep mountain pass. (One and one half hours worth of inching.) Truckers passed the word that what lay at the bottom was a wreck with four people dead. I heard later that the accident had occurred early in the morning. I arrived around 2 pm and took my place in line, inching, stopping, inching. I could feel an energetic field surrounding the entire long three-lane wide ribbon of vehicles. People inside their cars did not look angry, or frustrated. Instead, thoughtful. As if we knew we were in the presence of mystery, as four souls swam around in the air, disoriented, confused by their new status. As if, now that we were all stopped, in line, with nowhere to go, nothing to do, we had given ourselves permission to bathe in this rare time of just breathing, inching, stopping, breathing, inching towards the bottom of the event that trailed its vast meaning that broke the surface of daily busyness back up the hill.

Today, at the book first event, at Cedar Hill, near Gainesville, Georgia, 30 women and one man came together in circle to listen as I read from the book and shared other stories from my life with Jeff and during the year after when his presence was deeply felt--and heard from others who also shared their similar experiences with loved ones passing. One woman whose teenage son died in her arms--and though people called and emailed her afterwards, they wouldn't meet her eyes. Another whose teenage son was "a bad boy" in society's eyes, and when he died she was shunned by society, and even lost her job. And she too, she said, was feeling about herself the way society was feeling about her, and all of a sudden she realized that what she was feeling from them actually originated within her, and she had a sudden awakening, the most powerful of her life. Since then she has learned holotropic breath work and works with people in grief to actually attune to their bodies and their feelings and to use the breath to help move grief out.

We spent quite a bit of our two hours together talking about howling, keening, what the body wants to do and has been forbidden by our society. Speculated that this attitude towards the unseemliness of natural processes that the body needs to undergo when experiencing great loss probably came over with the puritans, since we don't remember a time when it has not been there, despite the fact that we see Iraqi widows grieving loudly for their dead on the daily news.

One beautiful Hawaiian woman had just completed a PBS special on the experiences of four people as they moved towards death. Can't remember the name of it, but it took ten years to film. She traded me a book for the film, so I will find out.