The Mourning Hut

In early March, a friend did a reading for me using the I Ching. "You are in the mourning hut," she read. Spending time withdrawn from the world can bring illumination and restoration. After all, the Oracle pointed out, King Wen wrote the I Ching while spending thirty years in prison.

I am advised to "turn conflict into creative tension" and to "clarify and renew connection to the source." It said I will flourish if I let myself be led.

I find myself curiously reluctant to leave my house. Yesterday, I kept going back to bed to sleep, or lying on the floor to move the body about lazily, or resting in the sensation of energy. Outside were wild March winds and the hope of badly needed rain. The air was fresh and moist, the sort of weather that usually tempts me to a long walk. But I kept letting myself be led to just resting, as if in following the body's wisdom I will renew and clarify.

Because my understanding of grieving loss has been transformed through my experience with Louie-Louie, I feel uncertain what the mourning hut provides for me now. All my ideas about mourning, retreat, and grief have been loosened. There has been most of my life a romantic notion about grief, as if it were a special emotion much like falling in love. And always a story to go with it.

Eckhart Tolle writes, "Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is, rather than making up stories about it. Unhappiness covers up your natural state of well-being and inner peace, the source of true happiness."

I see that part of my story about grief has been that it is unhappy and that the story has led me away from the experience of the present moment. If I let myself rest in mourning the loss of Louie-Louie, of Bonsai, of relationships that have come to a close, of wanting something to be different, the story recedes.

I don't think the mourning hut is an unhappy place. It seems instead a place to rest, regroup, renew, and see where life wants to lead next. A place to celebrate Louie-Louie's form and formlessness and his contribution to well-being. I thought I would miss Louie's presence at the door to the kitchen in the mornings, but I have noticed instead a deep feeling of peace that he has gone free of form and that he is "all and everything" as Puff communicated through Sharon.

The door to the hut is open. Or, there is no hut. It's simple--just another experience that deepens Presence.