To Love what Death can Touch

This afternoon in Bristol,

watching my six and a half year old great nephew and his grandma construct a home out of empty boxes with sellotape and scissors. They are making it for three 

"Stickies" -  amazing jelly like creatures which you can twist round your finger and hurl at a wall and they stick there. And then you can peel them off and they don't break. I bought them for him from a slot machine outside a supermarket.....like the ones you used to buy gobstoppers from.... with an octagonal  thrupenny piece. These were only 20p each. Total bargain.

I'm in awe of his and his grandma's creativity and dexterity and imaginations ...and the wonderful supply of craft materials kept by his mother.

 Recently she recommended me a book called "The Wild Edge of Sorrow - Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief" by Francis Weller.

It had arrived when I got home tonight so I've only dipped into the preface where he writes about the Five Gates of Grief. The first one being "everything we love we will lose" and he quotes this wonderful twelfth-century poem,

'Tis a fearful thing 

To love

What death can touch.

To  love, to hope, to dream,

And oh, to lose.

A thing for fools, this,

Love,

But a holy thing

To love what death can touch.

Earlier today a dear friend asked me what gives me comfort in the dark times...or at any time...and I found it hard to answer her. I thought it might be something like looking forward to something delicious to eat....or being in the company of dearly beloveds.....both true.

But reading this poem and how it reaches into my soul, and how it speaks to my condition, and how long ago it was written, and how it's a universal truth ...it does comfort me. To know I'm not alone and foolish in experiencing this 'wild edge of sorrow'.