Joan Didion, our Queen of Grief
“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.” - Joan Didion
By trying to “make things better”, we imply that there is a lack in what IS of the current moment.
Denying the present is a recipe for suffering. Didion knew the power of being the present, because there is no promise of the next.
In The Poetic Life: a guided bibliotherapy meditation, we will focus October on the wisdom of Joan Didion’s writing, her ability for introspection, from the most direct and un saccharine space, a space of someone who has truly lived the pain of this being human.
In focusing on the sovereign archetype, as I have in this month’s writing and workshops, it is less about the ability to rule that creates a Queen/King, but more about the surreal knowingness to forgive—to rise from the ashes of our life (the death process) and find ourselves at the rising wisdom of atonement. This is how Joan Didion is the Queen Mentor of Grief, her forgiving eye on the human condition, her ability to see what is and allow it to be from her own arrival at acceptance. A deep, sorrowful wisdom gained from losing her husband and daughter at seventy. She will guide us to a deeper understanding of self, through the wisdom of her words.
“FORGIVE: (V) The sense of “to give up desire or power to punish” (late Old English) is from use of such a compound as a Germanic loan-translation of Vulgar Latin *perdonare (Old Saxon fargeban, Dutch vergeven, German vergeben “to forgive,” Gothic fragiban “to grant;”
