Acceptance

I just read such a moving post from two years ago about a mother giving birth to a stillborn son, she chose to have the natural birth knowing that and still hold the baby and feel deeply all the emotions and there was not a trace of bitterness in the post.. It really moved me and it made me think how acceptance is such a gentle energy, it has a softness to it that is just not present when we rail our fate and argue with what has been chosen by god knows what powers to happen in our life.

That said being angry is also a marker of grief, but the sad thing is that some get stuck in anger and non acceptance for years and years and years (I can say I see elements of myself in that).. In another blog from the same writer she mentioned forgiveness as essential to her to healing from her own childhood sexual trauma, she mentioned that it was only maturity that allows this kind of forgiveness and acceptance of things that hurt, as well as a willingness on some level to surrender to the pain while not allowing the best parts of her spirit to be defeated by the harsh experiences.. It brings to me these words from a poem of Rilke :

O, how dear you will be to me, then, nights

of anguish. Inconsolable sisters, why did I not

kneel more to greet you, lose myself more

in your loosened hair? We, squanderers of pain.

How we gaze beyond them into duration’s sadness,

to see if they have an end. Though they are nothing but

our winter-suffering foliage, our dark evergreen,

one of the seasons of our inner year – not only

season – : but place, settlement, camp, soil, dwelling.

The dwelling place that Rilke speaks about that opens up to me also speaks of the solid ground such suffering through and acceptance of pain’s passage can bring to us as a result. When we continue to run, refuse, argue, reject and resist the deepening experience something painful asks of us we can never peacefully ‘dwell’ anywhere and most certainly with comfort deep inside our own skin. Maturity and the acceptance of suffering through on the other hand build for us a container, in which that sorrow remains forever contained but no longer acts subconsciously to kill off or destroy the seeds of new life seeking to take root in the place of ashes.