Adrift
Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.
-Mark Nepo
A note from Carl 12/15/25
Greetings, dear friends.
I want to send deep gratitude for the kind words and prayers that so many of you offered after Erin shared in our last newsletter about my mom’s unexpected and peaceful passing, following a beautiful week of family gathering at her home on Cape Cod to celebrate her 80th birthday.
I have felt stretched by the full experience of being human these last weeks – all the gratitude, the beauty, the connection; all the loss, the shock, the grief.
Though I have been in an underground, liminal state, I feel very much alive. I am so infinitely grateful for somatic practices, for inner-listening practices, for family and community, and for holding grief, in its many wild and mysterious flavors, as sacred medicine, and as an expression of love for what is lost.
When my father died, 22 years ago, I felt more like the line from Rilke:
“I have no knowledge yet in grief, and so this mass of darkness makes me small.” At that time, I thought grief was something to get through. I wasn’t able to grieve in community. There were ways that my meditation practice distanced me from my grief, a kind of premature disidentification, without having fully felt the loss.
I am grateful to have grown knowledge in grief over these past decades, to have taken up an apprenticeship with sorrow, and to feel what holy ground I am standing on in this grieving process. How much the love of my mother is woven into the tenderness of the mourning. Now, my meditation practice does not insulate me from this grief, but supports me in becoming large enough to hold it all, and to be fully intimate with this moment through my whole body. Everything is beautiful, and I am so sad.
If you did not get to read Erin’s newsletter last week, here is my mom’s obituary. I miss her dearly. I am so grateful to have had a week with my two sisters in the house where we shared so many childhood memories. It was so good to be able to cry, to laugh, to share stories, and have long, tearful walks on the beach. One time, I paused to do some movement practice, and three seals watched me the whole time from the water, very curious about this grieving human waving his arms and spine around.
I am grateful that in coming home and starting to work again, my work allows me to stay close to the grieving process. As Erin and I are in the deep process of bringing forth this opus of our life’s work and teaching in Refugia in February, I am touched to recognize that all of the practices and meta-themes we will be exploring together during the 13 months of our training are exactly what are giving me ballast, support, and refuge during this challenging time. I will be leaning into them during the beautiful and no doubt challenging times to come. If you would like to join us in a nourishing community working with deepening practice and presence together, we invite you to apply. We’d love to have you in the circle.
I am so grateful for practice, for community, for refuge.
And thank you, dear reader, for being a part of our community.
With great love and tenderness,
Carl
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