On Generosity and Grief

I’ve been considering the deeper meaning of generosity of late, past the slippery slopes of codependency of “over-giving and that of “giving away” money, time, and energy. This contemplation has made me aware of a certain amount of heartbreak that has ebbed and flowed over the last two weeks. And it finally occurred to me that Mother’s Day was coming up and my mother died three years ago.

I don’t think it matters the age when one’s mother goes, whether it’s from death or another type of “death-like” abandonment, the children left behind always feel a gaping hole. As those left behind, we must find the means within ourselves to be the mother and connect with the mother within. And ah, the crux of this! For to touch the mother within comes the reality of the loss. Many unconsciously project the “mother” on another, replaying a cycle of abandonment (insert cycle of choice here) over and over rather than addressing the reality of the pain and moving into more satisfying pastures of deep connection.

Amazingly, within the grieving process, there is a type of generosity that can happen: “giving away” becomes a “give-way”. A mother’s love in its purity is unconditional, the ultimate in generosity. Nature is also unconditional, generous in all it’s extremes. When the Mother of origin is gone, the All Mother takes over, and if we can “give-way” to our process, we are returned again and again to our nature, the nature of our truest being.

Yet many don’t “give-way”, western society would tell us that the grieving process takes a couple of months. And indeed we have people around us for several weeks, we have family that remember on holidays and at different times.

But grief is a lot like rain storms. They come they go, they are seasonal, and sometimes they are random. Very often we experience the rain storm by ourselves.

And here is where generosity and the unconditionality of a mothers love can come forward: those spaces and times when you’re alone and that sense of heartbreak starts to creep in, are you able to be generous? Do you allow for the skies to break open into their natural beauty…allowing for the seeds of new possibility to be nurtured by the rain of your tears? Can you give way to support, receiving others care, allowing them to be the watering can, the container for your grief? Can you own your own storm and not project, blame, judge or take on another’s?

Being with grief just as all complex emotions requires at times the fine art of discernment, it can take time to understand…but to get to it, we must enter a mother’s generosity, a give-way zone of deep care that allows for its expression and subsequent possibility. For in the give way is the possibility, and in the possibility, the transformation, and in the transformation, the richest expression of love and care.

May all be well and happy. Namaste ❤️