I was talking to a close friend the other day and it’s always difficult for me to have to share harsh truths. When I was little, I asked for “clarity” as my spiritual gift and I didn’t realize at the time that it would put me in a never-ending war with lies and liars because I can always see what’s real. In living this life of seeing things for what they are I developed a practice of asking to speak. My friend interjected on my practice assuring that I would never have to ask for such permission, but I need that exchange for grounding. When I finally secured the verbal clearance to say the thing that might hurt, I couldn’t believe what came out of my mouth.

You would think that when I ask for permission to say a hard thing that I already know exactly what I’m going to say. I do not. The download happens in real time and the phrases that I turn are not my own. I hold on to them though because some are BARS… back to the story I told my friend this:

“You have a hole the shape of a mother in your heart, and you keep trying to stuff different people and things in there and they don’t fit. Stop doing that. The more you keep sticking the wrong stuff in there the worse you leave the hole. It’ll never close, but you’ll learn to grow having a hole, and you’ll be ok.”

It hurt my feelings having to say it, but I knew that it wasn’t just for them, and it wasn’t just about losing people. We live this life long enough and we won’t make it out with everything we ever had, that’s the nature of life. Some things we lose, and we don’t even remember that we had them, others leave a hole.

Do you remember rattan furniture? (stay with me). Growing up I had this rattan rocking chair that sat in the corner of the TV room. It was my favorite place to sit. Not because it was comfortable, but because I have a sensory thing that was satisfied when I ran the back of an ink pen across the holes. One day a strand popped out of the chair, and I could fit my pen in one of the holes. How convenient right? Except the more I stored my sensory pen in the rattan hole, the bigger the hole got. Such as life.

When we mourn the loss of access to a person, thing, or sentiment there are cycles that we pass through (stages of grief) and even after what we all call the last step of acceptance, the hole remains. The job that we are left to do is honor the hole, respect it, acknowledge it, don’t put stuff in it, and if we’re lucky we make it to the end of this journey without falling in one of our holes and getting stuck.