All Life is Loss

I smiled when I read a friend's amusing outgoing message today, "When your dreams turn to dust, vacuum."

All life is loss. It is loss just as certain as it is growth and rebirth.

You can take the most boring stick and you can carve it into a work of art. And from that carving will fall wood dust and shavings. And surely you can scoop those up and use them as tinder to start a blazing fire.

When you stick your hand in the dirt it feels like nothing. Yet when you fertilize it and plant seeds in it and water it big beautiful blooms grow from it. Amazing cycles of life and regeneration and growth and death. ALWAYS DEATH and loss. We want to forget that part.

It is so easy to remember our journeys of friendship and joy. Yet we have a harder time enduring or talking about the parts of our journey that are a thousand barren nights of alone. These too happen. It is part of the process. The seasons of pain and birth and healing and growth and dying. I don't always 'get it' I don't always LIKE it. But it happens. It happens to me and you and every living being.

When Tibetan Buddhist creates a sand mandala it is a thing of exquisite beauty. And upon completion are ritually destroyed. Even the sand used to create the mandala is thrown back to nature.. "earth to earth, dust to dust"... the cycles of life continue. They symbolize impermanence.

Loss never feels like it will turn into anything good. It just doesn't. I once heard a voice say to me, "I was protecting you from a terrible career choice" after I was passed over for a promotion that I was FAR more capable of and the woman who replaced me was a woman who used to call me for advice and help. I quit soon after. But the slap in the face was indeed a career wake up for me. Was it loss? Was it dust? Or was it tinder to start the fire? (At the time, I promise you it did NOT feel like a good thing. Decades later, it was the shift the started a progression in time).

All life is loss.