Hello,
I love this poem because it calls us back, it reminds us that grief is not only sorrow; it is testimony. It marks that something mattered. That someone mattered.
Grief is not a single event. It ripples. One loss stirs up others, personal, ancestral, communal. It sends tremors through the body, the memory, the very ground we walk on. It reminds us how interconnected we are, how even distant hills "shudder" when something essential is lost.
Her words trace the contours of pain without being consumed by it, insisting on dignity, on memory, on connection. She captures something unspeakably tender about grief, not just its ache, but the way it rearranges the world around us. The way absence becomes a kind of echo that never quite stops.
In a world heavy with suffering, sometimes unbearably close, it's easy to feel as though we must turn away, harden, or shut down just to survive. But Angelou gives us another path: not to run from grief, but to enter it. To recognize the field it opens a place where we may feel reduced, yes, but not ruined. A space where, slowly, peace blooms... always irregularly.
Staying open to pain doesn't mean we let it consume us. It means we let it connect us to the ones we've lost, to each other, to lost places and the lost parts of ourselves; to the truth that "they existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed."
In holding grief together, not fixing it, but witnessing it we weave something sturdier than sorrow: a shared human field. And in that field, life continues. Softly. Differently. But still, it continues.
The Grief Reflections is released at the end of June and we come together in our live session on July 30th. It is a space for 'our senses, [to be] restored', for remembering and witnessing ourselves and each other. If your tender heart feels the call I'd love you to join me.
With love,
Remi
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