Thoughts On Loss

 

Losing. 

I have a personal faith that every living soul is created physically and spiritually, and it comforts me.

Years ago, I decided to start from nothing, and to build a foundation of spiritual belief, brick by brick. Every brick had to be something personal and true. 

Working with my horses day after day, I realized there is something more that animates them, something more than just the physical. And, there's something in me that resonates with that something spiritual in them. 

When my mom was visiting a few weeks ago, she saw my copies of Rilke's works, and she is reading them now, too. She flipped through The Dark Interval to a section I had highlighted some years ago, and she read it out loud to me as we sat and had coffee:

Today, my attitude toward death is that it frightens me more in those whom I failed to truly encounter and who remained inexplicable or disastrous to me, than it does in those whom I loved with certainty when they were alive, even if they burst only for a brief moment into the radiant transfiguration of intimacy which love can reach. If people took some simple pleasure in reality (which is entirely independent of time), they would never have needed to come up with the idea that they could ever again lose anything with which they had truly bonded. No constellation is as steadfast, no accomplishment as irrevocable as a connection between beings which, at the very moment it becomes visible, works more forcefully in those invisible depths where our existence is as lasting as gold lodged in stone, more constant than a star.

When Cowboy passed, I remembered that morning with my mom reading, and the words came back and came alive.  I understood them in a different way. It is impossible to lose what we have truly loved.

I just wanted to share that with you this morning.