Ordinary Grief - the Hopelessness of Hope

Grief is an expression of letting go of our hopes - or our desire for the world to be other than it is - as those hopes dissolve and sink in the inevitable and uncontrollable tides of life.

A series of recent experiences find me grieving.

But the genesis of these thoughts on grief was in my first experience of total grief as an opening. A reservoir of grief associated with killing animals. Something I had done to feed my family for more than 10 years. Animals we raised on the farm. Animals that we treated kindly, fed and nurtured... only one day to separate them from their herd, single them out and then kill them. Up close and personal. Looking them in the eye. Ending their life. Skinning them, gutting them, dismembering them, slicing and chopping them. Feeding them to our children and our dogs.

The brutality and violence. The ultimate betrayal.

All this I had done willingly, without real reservation and only a little trepidation around minimising suffering for the animal. The grief was never acknowledged or even really sensed. But it was stored.

One day, when I had enough space to notice, it came pouring out, along with a thousand other griefs stored in my life, in a stream of tears that lasted days. An enormous reservoir of unacknowledged grief that cracked, crumbled and left me wondering if I would drown, if I would ever recover.

I didn't recover, nor would I want to. Since that time I have felt every grief more clearly.

What I did discover was an opening. The suffering was not necessary. Instead it was contingent on my confused relationship with conflicting hopes and desires that were overriding an innate kindness and compassion. I stopped killing animals and found different ways to feed myself, my family and my dogs. The font of that grief ceased to flow the day I resolved to stop killing.

But the sources of grief are myriad. Farming, like life more generally, provides endless circumstances to activate our complex and conflicting hopes. Little griefs around the weather, what people will pay for what we grow, the fickle markets, the relentless regulatory and administrative burden...

For the past few weeks I have been grieving the loss of more complex hopes - for unfulfilled plans for the farm, lost potential in relationships that I value, and the slow dismantling of stories that I have used to explain and justify my being here now.

I have the choice to sink or swim. Sometimes, even when I would like to swim, it is hard to know which way is up. It has been like that recently. Dumped by the waves of life's ocean, I have swirled, struggling to breathe, vision a blur, wondering, as so often before - When will I surface?

This time however, for the first time, there is a second question - Can I surface without clinging to a new set of hopes?