On Grief and Love

Hello Friends,

First, I owe many of you an apology for not personally responding to your emails. I do read them and they mean more to me than I can express. I am very grateful for the time you've taken to put your love and encouragement into words. The honest truth is that it is still cognitively taxing for me to respond to emails. My brain is recovering very well but isn't fully braining yet and email is one of those things that I don't challenge it to do yet. I lean heavily on the inbox team to take care of that and I thank you all deeply for your understanding.

Today, I don't have it in me to write a hopeful letter.

After the events of the past week when we saw some of the worst manifestations of hierarchy and gaslighting playing out in the White House, the realignment of global alliances, the breakdown of relations with our neighboring countries, the decimation of our civil service, and the response of our fellow citizens, the predominant emotion of our community is grief.

So let's make space for grief.

It’s a legitimate response to the current state of things. You can be emotionally regulated and still experience grief. You can be engaged in community care and still experience grief. You can be deeply connected to your role in the social change ecosystem and still experience grief. You can hold a vision for the future, and still experience grief, not because all paths are closed, but because the one you expected is no longer clear.

Grief is the echo of love, a response to the absence of what once was or how we had hoped it would be. Grief is what happens when our hearts refuse to become numb to what matters. "Grief is just love with no place to go." -Jamie Anderson

In this moment, I invite you to lean into the things that remind you of the presence of love and give you a direction to channel your love. How lucky are we to spend time with little humans who are overflowing with it on a daily basis?

"Love is more than the electricity which lightens our darkness, more than the etheric waves that transmit our voices across space, more than any of the energies that humanity has discovered and learned to use.

Of all things, love is the most potent."

Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, p. 286

If you would like to be in community with other adults who hold a strong conviction about the power of love to be a force for change in the universe, then I'd like to remind you of this upcoming course from TIES:

Syntropy: The Guiding Energy Integrating Montessori Thought and Process
Class starts tomorrow, March 8th.

As I mentioned last week, sometimes you have to zoom far out, across space and time, to catch a glimpse of your cosmic task and your cosmic Self. I think the content of this course will help you do that. It will help you reconnect to the large patterns and forces that you are a part of. Forces that manifest galaxies... planets... life. Forces that create harmony from chaos.

You can find more information and register here: https://ties-edu.org/syntropy/ (This course is not hosted by Trillium. Please contact TIES if you need assistance with your registration.)

With love,

-Seemi

You can find the published version of this email here: https://pages.trilliummontessori.org/posts/on-grief-and-love

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