If you've been down and can't remember the path up

If you have been down you may not remember the path back to up. In traditional stories involving journeys, spirals that spin the heroes down and  paths without markers to help you find your way back, there are some serious slides down to the down of all downs.  Remember, "I must go down to the sea again."?  Well, you might not. But Sea Fever, John Masefield's poem, is about the pull of the ocean and whatever else was behind that calling to go down to the sea again.  Many journeys we go on don't seem to have a pull as if from a positive passion directing our attention.  Well, the traditional rights of passages that heroes go on seem to have misdirection as their aim in changing the hero's psyche. The hero thinks she's going one way and fate pulls her into another direction. When we're tired from all the traveling or expecting too much from the here and now or otherwise not paying attention, that is when the gods or history steps into your life and shifts things up on you; turns smooth roads into slippery ones and leads you to a path you don't know. You may feel that you got plopped smack in the middle of nowhere.  You may know it as feeling down or sad or grief.  Grief should be a well-known territory but even in this day and age it is largely an uncharted territory. 

If grief leaves you on the beach without the resources to find your way back up, follow any thread you can find.  What we know now about grief is at least this much - it has threads; it has filaments; it has tentacles that reach toward the light.  Strange really.  You might expect the opposite. But like a root vegetable starved for water, grief will grow fibers and hairs and roots to search out for the life it will find in water.  It wants you to survive.  Where there seems like there is no there, there, there is a thread of something that is thin but definitive. 

I'm struck by the amnesia that grief seems to cause many.  The journey back is one of remembrance.  Storing old memories in new locations. Finding ways to be from your store of knowledge and working them into the now of it.  If it ends up being a journey that brings you back to fullness, and you get what you were missing or a bouquet of falling in love with the world again, that too is good. There is a lot of good out there and sometimes you have to go down to the sea to find it. Sometimes you have to ride the waves.  I hope this and every journey you are on leaves you fuller or connected to what and who you love more than the last. Coming home to yourself is a good thing. Welcome back.