a lesson in grief from a raindrop

A cloud teardrop fell from the sky and took me by the hand on my wayward journey.

My steps were lost to our dying ways and coming unto our living days I beheld an end so close that I knew my waking had only just begun.

“Where must I go?” I asked to the teardrop in the rain.

“Wherever you can where your “must” cannot enter. Be there and let it sit outside your door to do whatever it does in its aloneness, until it falls to listening, until it leaves its own self and passes through the closed door to come meet you.”

“How is it that you a single teardrop from the sky, know all this?”

“I’m afraid I have no satisfactory explanation to give you. But as to the source of my words, I know an intimacy with something you only pretend to know about.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Grief.”

“But I know something of grief. I’ve made it my work to learn how to grieve, though it seems an unacceptable thing to so many in this world to grieve for so long. I am no stranger to grief. But while this may be true, I’m beginning to sound defensive. Tell me, what is it I don’t know of grief?”

“I will tell you but you don’t yet know how to listen. Upon hearing me say this, you may quickly come up with many “buts,” all valid I’m sure, though this is precisely of what I speak. Your defense and well-thought-out explanations keep you from listening. They keep you from grief. To listen is to die, and furthermore to relinquish your instantaneous need for rebirth. To be reborn without relinquishing is not a rebirth at all, but a rejection of death.”

“Should I never speak at all then?”

“You already know that speaking and listening aren’t opposed to one another. Listen in the midst of your speaking, listen before and after, for then it will not be you who speaks but the well from which you come. Then you will know something of grief.”

Then the drop fell from my open hand to join the stream below on its homeward journey to the sea.