The Other Vacations: Your Flock of Griefs

Ouch, the empty spot is unbearable isn’t it? Our recent losses in this inner circle have spanned the void - losses human, animal & inner/ psychic....  
 
Dare I say, the magnitude and substance of love and grief  with our animals or realities/ dreams / beliefs is the “same” in substance as what we hold and lose for parent, child, friend  - we just pretend otherwise in some sick “bystander effect,” shy to display the blade sunk to the hilt in our ebbing sides.  Talk of “attachment” is twinned with talk of “loss” as if our loves and lives are measurable and discrete; jellybeans in a jar. Not so.  And when I consider the gentle advice of Buddha - releasing attachments to this fickle world- I get a bad and angry taste in this seasoned mouth - if I do not dive full and unreserved into each beloved large and small,  who will honor know remember and defend them, whose blood bond whispers always  their name?  
 
The expected impact on our work and function of some “loss” might be less, not measured or formally recognized the same as the departure of father, mother, daughter, son...but any tailor fitting the still, leaden form of my griefs knows the depths and dimensions, the topography of my mourning  body and my howling hunger for the Lost has no relation to the stature, the status, the nature of what is lost.  
 
It  is only because we fell (or were booted) out of mystic that we pretend to catalog and weigh, make some ludicrous taxonomy, that the loss of a certain type of insistent cool falling Sunday rain is different from the extinction of your best friend’s shining eyes running full speed in soft powder velvet summer dirt, laughing  heart exploding in heat and rhythm... different from the final rise and fall of the chest of a small, loyal calico cat, glancing steady and calm into your eyes- she  who has walked present by you daily as long as yourself...is different from grandpa, wheezing, watery blue eyes shut, tethered not much longer to the cinderblock- linoleum-florescent misery of “assisted living” murmuring a song about “meet me in the lilacs my sweet love, ” different from...  
 
All of this is the world forever peeling away, turning a tear-stained face to the wall with a shaky inhale, and constantly saying goodbye, like a canoe in white mist grating against the rocky shore and then loosened, pulling away almost soundless retreating over dark glass except for a few splashes as water sings off  gentle dipping oars and drops down again, rejoining the swallowing vast water.  
 
Sometimes I think life passes us a series of “vacations” as the familiar, the loved, the seats of our heart and home stealthily “vacate” this place, like daubs of blending shifting watercolor moving slow, until now almost all the light might be unfamiliar and disoriented we too are wanting to go...to follow, to return? The notes bars and tunes we contribute hardly fit in this brave new world, we are misfit, obscure, forlorn.  That’s not cheerful I know, but it’s the deep sense in my gut as time rolls and sweet companions of all forms slip away- like Bukowski’s days, running away Wild Horses Over the Hills, like foxes and shadows of foxes overlaid,  legs outstretched in bounding reaching, like the tumbling falling curling ears-over-tail slow somersault fall of a cat in dream, paws curled rolling slow in the drowsy echoing spaces of sleep....  Slip  towards home-  which we thought was behind us but is elusive on all sides playing “hide and seek” now near now far, in the thick woods we wander at dusk balanced on what is “real.” Hear that bark, laugh, door slam, come home but the spot on the worn wood floor is so empty, home has shifted becoming into something else, too late we realize we can’t go home even as we stand in the “living room.” Our angels have left, in some hurry.
 
Tricks of light and love keep us tied here ready or not, like a kid listening to the many running hiding footsteps, crouched in the closet between umbrellas boots and dusty coats,  covering his eyes and counting to ten.