Embrace the Losses - John O'Donohue

May you know that absence is alive with hidden presence,
that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.
May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo.

May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere,
where the presences that have left you dwell..
May you be generous in your embrace of loss.
May the sore well of grief turn into a seamless flow
of presence.

May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and
twilight are one - within the Great Belonging.

John O'Donohue
from: To Bless the Space Between Us

Original title: A Blessing for Absence

~

In memory of my mother
who passed from this life into
the "secret Elsewhere"
one year ago today...

~

And this goes out to all
who have experienced loss
around the world in our ongoing
coronavirus crisis...

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
"Mom's last wave"

Be ahead of all parting - Rilke

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.

For beneath winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

Be forever dead in Eurydice - more, gladly arise
into seamless life...
Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
be a crystal cup that shatters as it rings.

Be. And know as well the need to not be;
know the great void where all things begin,

the infinite source of your most intense vibration,
so that you may give it your perfect assent
and come to completion now.

To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable
numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
add yourself gladly...

Rainer Maria Rilke

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13

I combined the translations of Stephen Mitchell,
Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

With thanks to Being Silently Drawn

~

Eurydice was Orpheus' wife, but is also
a reference to the underworld in Greek Mythology.