There are certain “consumable” negative emotions.

Emotions that take on lives of their own, chart their own path, and burn out whatever else is in their way. That is how grief feels to me, like an internal burning. Grief is an emotions I have been fortunate enough to have experienced far less of this week due to complete immersion in my work project. Last weekend was filled with grief though, right to the very high brim.

Perhaps because I have been so consumed in something else, that I can talk about it today. Grief doesn´t care what else you have going on, how sad or tired you are, it will claim what it is taking. It has its own agenda. There is a certain amount of letting go that grief requires because it doesn´t care what else you planned for the afternoon or day. It shows up. All of your other agenda items are ignored by it.

I can imagine people who lose a partner or spouse after a long time and the grief hits them hard in the middle of the night, in line at the grocery store, whenever. My experience of heartbreak is similar. Loss is loss, I consider.

Weirdly, there is some kind of poetry about my own heartbreak and profound sense of loss. I think. Maybe I feel that way because I have wanted to do the work I am currently doing in Iquitos for a long time. Sitting out and gazing and feeling in Iquitos has a poetry of its own. It also happens to accompany tearful emotions. There may be a binding principle about grief that unites us as humans. As I know all people have it, even if the concept is relative. It seems to me to be a hallmark of us.

I am interested in how our brains work, how my own feelings play out, and how systems can be bent further towards human connection over other drivers like greed or fear. I am optimistic about change in all of us, perhaps mostly clearly evidenced by my own sense of progress moving towards new information. Perhaps even towards possibility. But in all of this, all of the time, there is loss in us. Too.