Sharing

I have been visiting a board dedicated to grief, in particular I've been on a thread for parents who have lost teen or adult children. Today one of my board buddies posted the following. She gave me permission to share it on my blog. The board is private so I am unable to give her credit for it so I would ask that you not copy it. I found this to be simply beautiful.



I wake to the chill of a new day.
The cold of night has etched the corners of my window.
The transformation of last night’s rain still falls in weighted elegance
and blankets what is left of fall’s remains.
The beauty of the frozen rain solidified into playful droplets of white that fills my mind with the wonderment of the season beginning.
In last night’s rain the trees shown bare of leaves, ugly in their nakedness.
Now the morning snow clothes and defines every branch, revealing the graceful brilliance and enduring strength that I dismissed in the absence of their fruit.
Am I the tree once graced with the beauty of life?
I swayed in the wind, cast shadows of fullness on the ground.
Did others see me as alive and brilliant with my colored branches extending and reaching for the light of the new day?
When the leaves fell from my branches and the coolness of my autumn gave way to deaths dark hand, do I look as barren and naked as the tree I condemned to ugliness?
Does my grief leave me barren and lifeless casting a shadow of solitude, thin in
proportion of my former self?
Or somehow with the frozen grace of the night, can hope fall on my desolate limbs defining my beauty and strength as I bravely face the season of quiet.

A snowflake falls in unison with its companions. It is not alone but it is unique in its shape and form. Carved from the same beginning but bringing a uniqueness that speaks of its individual expression. The love that we have shared with our child now lost from this earth, is frozen in heaven’s grace.
Forged from the same maker, it falls around us in quiet gentle individuality.
I capture each flake from my love and the angels I have been blessed to take communion with, on my naked branch. The beauty of my structure is outlined,
clothed in grace that I might stand mighty in cold, proud of my nakedness. This is my season of stillness, in quiet reflection of my former self.
With love on my branches and my soul firmly rooted in grace
I will tend and nurture in quietness the seeds of my new life.
The blossoming of this new life will come as inevitably as winter yield to spring.
I will not rush the birth of my seedlings, nor will I disparage their timeliness.
Do we chastise the tree for its bareness in winter?
Do we call on the flowers to bloom with brilliance through the snow?
As it is their time to rest and take in the nutrients of the soil,
it is my time to rest, to heal.