Mourning = DETACHMENT “Perfect is Enemy of Good”

You’ve drawn the Mourning card. Don’t recoil. Mourning is a growth process which, because it hurts so much, feels like retrenchment. But in the Garden, pruning IS growth. Artists try to convince us that spaces – which may seem blank or even empty to us, are part of the design. But what is the design? It makes us hurt – it makes hearts and brains hurt – even to attempt understanding of all this emptiness. All this change. But physicists remind us matter transforms; it doesn’t “vanish.” As we contemplate the empty spaces with a sore heart and a buzzing brain, we will need peace and compassion to appreciate the majesty of the whole design.

We expect sore muscles after exercise, but, oddly, we don’t expect a “sore heart” or “sore mind” as we struggle along our Soulmate path. Sometimes it’s a “sore spirit.” We’re not doing anything “wrong”; life is a rhythm. The “perfection” in our imagination is STASIS – the opposite of “life”. The nature of the Other is to break our immature expectations of Perfection with the Wildness of their Mystery. If we are to create a New World together, the old world has to go! The Mourning card warns us that this is not an effortless adjustment. It can feel like loss and it is a loss, the loss of our proud loneliness. It can feel like sadness and there is sadness that our privacy will be invaded. There is terror: we will be exposed.

But Mourning is Detachment – you can see the Lost Past drifting away from you like a child’s balloon. It is not just “OK” to mourn, it is actually necessary. The fact that you had a worthy self, a worthy past, a dignified life and were “fine on your own” is part of what makes you Beloved. Your Soulmate is feeling this too. It is yet another thing you can share, and there are all sorts of ways to honor it. Some Soulmates need to start by keeping their own apartment. Some will need their own room, or private and alone times for retreat. It is necessary to establish boundaries such as private journals, private phones, private work. We are developing trust, as well as changing at the same time. Honor those sore muscles of honest effort. Just as sore muscles will slowly improve, so will this sore heart/mind/spirit. We must rub it with the liniment of love, trust, sharing, hope and self-regard. We are brave, and no mistake!

#HAIKU: Detachment

Contemplate:
Fight
Scream
Separate
Detach
Ache
Mourn
Share
Surrender
Blend