In a letter following the death from scarlet fever of his beloved five-year-old son, American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “I chiefly grieve that I cannot grieve.” Later, in an essay, this: “The only thing grief has taught me, is how shallow it is.”
I’m always tickled when I hear the expression “hopping mad.” Of course, it has absolutely no clinical application. And one must never ask a person who is hopping mad if he’s hopping mad.
“You are the sky,” observed Pema Chodron. “Everything else—it’s just weather.” Oh, how we love to talk about the weather. And to do so with the ardency of children in a sandbox.
There is the visible, the world of form, and then there is the invisible, the formless, which inexplicably erupted 14 billion years ago. If all we’re aware of is the world of form, we’re semi-conscious, lost in a mad whorl of thought and emotion.
When I was in primary school I got into a physical fight with a classmate. It ended briefly with me sitting on his chest. And I was crying. And he looked up at me and said, “It’s OK. It’s OK.”
Men's Work 