Walking the Path

I recently asked my spirit guardian how best to deal with grief and sadness. He said, "Give grief all the time and space it needs, but don't live in it." 

I understood exactly what he meant. We've all met people who "live in it" in a negative sense. They get into that space of intense grief, anger or bitterness and... they get stuck there. I think people like that are a bit like travellers going through a dark forest. I'm not sure if they get lost or deliberately stop walking, but years pass and there they still are, still sitting in the dark with moss growing over them.

We all face dark forests at some time or another. The path of life can take us through meadows and deserts and forests. Sometimes it's gentle and the scenery is lovely and sometimes it's not, but all of it is a part of the great adventure of living. You have to keep on walking and that can really hurt when someone you love steps off the path to take a different route. 

There's a movie that sums this up most beautifully. It's called The Way.

It's about a grieving father who walks the Camino (ancient pilgrimage journey across Spain) for his dead son. He leaves his son's ashes at each marker along the route. Sounds a gloomy movie, but it's actually very funny in places. In the end, his journey becomes so much more than he expected, just the same as every life story. Farewells are painful, but you have to keep walking. So we find our ways to deal with the sadness as we walk. We give our emotions whatever space and time they need, but we don't stop and live there.