On grief and how nature helps

I tried to think of a clever title but decided it’s best to be explicit

Dear friends,

Put simply, today’s post is about magnolias.

I took this photo of a magnolia two days before my dad died. I can’t unsee it. Its colours are too bold, and they are etched into my retinas. Like a postcard stuck on my fridge door, it hangs there in my field of vision every time I pour a glass of orange juice. Ideally, I would like to take this particular postcard down off the fridge and recycle it. But I can’t.

Magnolia blooms.

Now, whenever I spot their beautiful blooms standing out against the blue sky of spring, my gut twists like a corkscrew, drops like a rollercoaster. It hurts, and I can’t escape those blooming petals. Although ice baths are painful, they are the best way to heal aching muscles. What I’m saying is that magnolias make me sad, but this is what I need.

I do not know how it is possible to hold all this grief inside me without the cathartic release of nature. But what to do if you are so caught up in your own inner world that nature cannot reach you because you cannot see it? The only thing I can think of that might be more painful than grief is being trapped inside yourself with nothing but that beast for company.

The reassuring arm of nature resting round my shoulder helps me see my grief and sit with it. It is, after all, a companion who is with me for life, who only wants to be seen, to have their hand held, to cry with me.

I won’t pretend that nature magically transforms grief into candyfloss. But it opens the door of the dark cupboard in which grief hides, deep within you, and lets you see that it is not a monster but a raw, painful expression of love.

It is hard, and isolating, to find something so objectively beautiful as a magnificent spring magnolia painful. It makes you feel like the world is upside down and broken, but only for you, while everyone else walks about the right way up, smiling calmly at the blossom. I have no wish to shatter this illusion of joyful spring for those for whom it is still intact, but I do want to reach out to others who might also feel trapped in their own personal madness that grief conjures. I am coming to the conclusion that it is okay for spring to hurt. The strength of its pain is merely a reflection of the strength of love—a strange, excruciating kind of comfort.

My only worry is how much harder navigating all this would be if nature is not a source of solace or a place of comfort, safety and curiosity. How cruel to teach people to fear the natural world, to cut them off from the one thing that will guide us and accompany us through our whole lives, outlive us and provide us with the wisdom and perspective of millennia.

I wrote this poem when I walked into my first magnolia blossoms earlier this spring. I have tried to capture the state of sheer mental freeze it puts me in, and I’m including it here since I’m not sure how much my words above will make sense to you if you are lucky enough for grief not to have touched your life.

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Spaced out

How dare the magnolias
Bloom so magnificently
All those pure pastel petals
Against that bold blue of bloody
Spring

So needlessly audacious, too
To do it
Every year
I’m still trying to sit
With the gentle magnolia

That hung over us
As the police pulled up
To ask if we were alright
So much life and heady
Early summer joy

Spilling out from long evening
Pubs and into the cows
With laughter floating
Through all that bold blue
We looked so spaced out

Jarred with the bubbling world
That we must have been high
Only stunned by mortality
Into stillness and contemplation
With shallow breath

While the world refused
To stop spinning
And mine
Was drifting away
In a hospital bed

So very far from
Those magnificent magnolias
And laughing pubs
And I understand why
The magnolias keep blooming

And I forgive them
And I am grateful
But I do wish
They could do it
More quietly

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I do not intend to depress you on your Friday morning, rather to reassure you that nurturing a relationship between nature and yourself, and facilitating this in others, is the most powerful, important thing you can do. I want everyone to know that, if you spend time cultivating this, whatever life hits you with, you will be alright.

Does any of this resonate with you? Is there anything in nature that has a similar effect for you?

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