to lose our context

It is comforting for me to hear words that capture what I feel.  They  create windows into my inner experience and help me articulate what is going on in my heart.   Mark Nepo seems to do that often for me.  Recently he wrote about what it feels like to lose our context.  That hit home. 

The sudden devastation of losing a child is like being in free fall.  We lose the context of our lives.  As Nepo says, we lose "where we have come from and where we are going . . . clearly we are most comfortable when we think we are progrssing from here to there", but in deep grief our familiar surroundings vanish.  We land heavily in a foreign place with no history and no guide for negotiating our way. 

At that point,  our only choice is to slow down, to listen more intently to our inner voice -that part of us that speaks the unfiltered truth.  We relocate ourselves one patient step at a time, one fully aware moment at a time.  We learn to listen to what we need rather than what we "should" need.  We learn to trust those who can simply be with us without trying to fix us.  We discover a different context that feels authentic and profoundly simple. 

We learn  in deeper and wider ways  that  "now" becomes where we are and "love" becomes what we do.