So often my emotions in grief feel like a huge rubber-band ball.
There are so many different feelings, all of them tangled up together and hard to sort out; they create a heaviness in my soul. And it is as though I can’t get to some of the central emotions until I deal with the peripheral ones that are most apparent. Those outer emotions are taut with potential for snapping, requiring immediate attention, but they aren’t the core.
This must be one more reason why grief is such a long journey…
I seem to have a lot of rubber-bands on my ball.
Christina….
In our GriefShare group we talked about how our grief is like a ball of yarn, with all of the intertwined emotions. But the rubber band ball ananlogy seems even more appropriate with it’s tautness and potential for snapping.
I think of you all very often. You are in my heart.
Angel Makinley’s Mommy
Very well said!
I hadn’t ever thought of grief in this way but it’s such a good picture. I have always talked about the onion in relation to grief and pain. You peel a layer of an onion…and that layer is gone…yet there’s another underneath. But that doesn’t fully capture it. The image of those taut bands that could snap is very powerful.
This grief is like a thing. It is a big, heavy, shapeless thing that is always there no matter what I’m doing or where I am.
If you continually grind a bar of iron, you can make a needle of it.
-CHINESE PROVERB
In our minds and hearts sometimes sorrow seems as if it is a huge, crude mass that weighs us down. It’s very presence is disturbing because it seems so impenetrable and unmanageable.
But this mass of sorrow is no different from a bar of iron from which a needle can be made. We can work to diminish our grief each day, whittling away at the power of our feelings and reactions by expressing and releasing them. Day by day, we can work towards getting this sorrow down to something manageable. We can watch our sorrow take on a shape that is not so crude, that has some definition, that seems to have some purpose.
I can work away at the mass of my grief, wearing it down little by little by releasing, relieving, and expressing all those components(rubber bands) that make up my feelings of deep sadness and despair. Before long, the mass will be reduced in size. It will take shape as something manageable that I can continue to work with. I can make a needle of my sorrow to repair my life.
taken from A Time to Grieve..Carol Staudacher
remembering Judson….God Bless Vince