No Place Too Small<\/strong><\/p>\nIt is easy to know how to meld with so much grief.
\nWith joy there is blindness, rose-colored ignorance,
\nNo body to tend, to anchor one to the earth.
\nWhen the world remains intact, you move nimbly,
\nCaressing the surface of things, noticing little.<\/p>\n
But grief burrows in.
\nIt needs only the exposed, wounded soul
\nTo dig in as a tick under skin.
\nGrief bangs around the cellar, shrieking,
\nbehaves unpredictably, hijacking your eyes
\nWhen the store clerk asks how you are. Clutching your
\nthroat when you call the dentist\u2019s office for a cleaning.<\/p>\n
You walk now among oblivious humans,
\nan emotional leper
\nWith lesions rotting your heart.
\nAll of existence has its own death,
\nIt too could slip into a tumor-ridden coma
\nAdorned with catheter tubes,
\nAnd gasp last breaths to the sterile beat
\nOf a monitor, attended by loved ones.<\/p>\n
Since there is no place too small
\nFor grief to infiltrate,
\nYou lie down, surrender, pull it
\nto every cell of your being.
\nYou take orders, as a dog obeys commands
\nFrom an owner; you honor and bear it,
\nAnd in this way, endure.<\/p>\n
–Kathryn Harper<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m healthy. My daughter thrives. My marriage is happy. The weather is sunny and mild. We’re not in the middle of a mortgage crisis. We can pay our bills. I have a good social network. So why have I grown tired, sad, and teary over the course of the day? I was prepared to chide […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[218,24,16,215],"tags":[256,176,140,301,69,152,229,269],"class_list":["post-2301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aenigmas","category-arts","category-nature","category-poetry","tag-attachment","tag-change","tag-death","tag-dharma","tag-grief","tag-love","tag-poetry","tag-suffering"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2301"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10612,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2301\/revisions\/10612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}