Reflection on MURMURATION
Three years ago, eye cared for a grief project with a few collaborators.
MURMURATION
Comrades and beloveds gathered at this tree a couple blocks from my then home.
We walked the bosque to be with our grief, ate together, moved, broke a piñata filled with excerpts of poems. We walked to this trailhead and grieved.
In the years since, eye have watched as those connections that held that project disintegrated.
People cancelled, new allegiances formed, beloveds turned to stranger.
My life is, in large part, filled with a whole new cast of characters.
Lightweight like when they recast Aunt Viv and acted like we wouldn’t notice, we noticed.
And even if the fit is better, there’s greater harmony and ease. What the f**k are you supposed to do with the memories? How do you grieve the relationships that held your hands while you began to tend grief?
eye planted those loves like crops, watering them, attending to them, singing them songs. And one day eye turned around and all my crops were gone, ripped from the soil, stem and root.
Last year, eye moved back to that neighborhood and found myself living in a cemetery. Surrounded by the location of past hangs and the sight of arguments, wincing at every car that passed by saying, “eye can be here. This is my home, too.”
Walking with ghosts. An ex-husband here, a once friend there – trying not to have a fucking PTSD meltdown at the Country Club Market.
There’s this tragic beauty of love failed
“reaching in the dark.”
Peut-être c’est amour perdu, ou complet, mort?
j’sais pas vraiment mais ça me pique.
Now, eye visit this tree. This tree that was a marker of that work of MURMURATION, of a community practice. The memory of those events. Now the practice is sitting with the discomfort of the end of love.
What do eye do with the love eye carry for people eye no longer know? Wear it proudly? Adorn it. Take it on the town. Shout it from the sandias. eye loved, proud, and loud. It happened before work, after dinner.
eye tweaked the recipe until it cooked, smelling of me and hope.
And what comes after? You know that trite saying “it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.”
Oh for sure. But like then what? What is there to do other than dance on the bones?
Questions for Reflection:
What rituals give you solace for grief that doesn’t involve death?
What actions and movements encourage you to live among the many little deaths that happen while living?
How many times have you pivoted? Died, in small ways? Ended a life you believed you would lead forever in favor of a life that fits more perfectly?
How do you celebrate the end of love?
And, does love ever end?
