I just bought this bunch of everlasting daisies from the cemetery florist. It seems more than a little ironic… For wandering between the old, sunken headstones out here, the knowledge of the temporary nature of things – of life – sinks in a little deeper.

How we like to forget this… to remain hidden from it in the everyday. Shielded. If you believed the stronger messages and myths that our (western) society spins, you’d think that youth can last forever (if only you buy the right face cream or get the right surgery or adopt the right frame of mind).

But the hundreds upon hundreds of graves out here all tell a different story.

What price might we pay, collectively, to do this to ourselves?
And what might it be costing you (and your loved ones) if you stay hidden from the thought of your own death? From the impending truth of it?

There’s an old broken piano keyboard in someone’s pile of junk out in my street, waiting for the garbage truck. Most of the keys are bent and some have broken off. It’s looking pretty forlorn…

Have you ever felt a bit like that sometimes?

Like some of your keys have gone missing somehow.
Or some of your strings have been busted.
Or you’re just generally out-of-tune; neglected; broken.

Maybe at times like those it’s been tempting to just give up and wait for the truck…

But maybe there’s another option, too?

The first day of March has just ticked-over, and with it, another season has passed. And one more has begun. Only just the other day, I photographed this billboard about summer and already time has moved on to somewhere else. Shifted. Changed.

Maybe the seasons of our lives, shift this way, too – stealthily, silently, slowly and then all too quick. Unless perhaps we take a moment to really notice them and mark them in some way…to connect with where we’re at.

So what season of your life are you in just now?

And what kind of seasons are there anyway?

I was wandering around some neighbourhood streets recently, when I came across these two cat-friends in the gutter, just hanging out together.

They reminded me of all those sayings about friends being the ones who’ll walk into a place with you when everyone else walks out… That friends are the people who’ll meet you where you are… maybe even share part of the journey ahead with you (even if that happens to be down in a gutter of some sort just now).

Interestingly, there are also some parallels to counselling here, too…

Coping with the holiday season isn’t always easy at the best of times. But if you’ve had a hard year – a time of upheaval or illness or loss – it can be a real challenge.

In Part 1 of this post, we looked at some ideas which people felt helped them get through the darker undercurrents of the festive season. Here are some more of their tips.

Maybe they’ll spark some ideas that could support you at this time…
Let the tears come if they want
Sometimes the tension can build for weeks around this time of year, especially if it marks an important anniversary or memory for you. If you sense the tension building, sometimes people have found it helpful to ‘meet’ with the sadness regularly, to release it.

So what might it be like, in the weeks leading up to the celebrations, to regularly take some time to simply feel your sorrow, or your anger, or to cry your tears?

Maybe making an appointment with your sorrow like this can ease the pressure, and maybe even help you breathe easier on the big day.

As the end of the year rolls around, it can seem like the carols are fairly chasing you around town, many of them insisting that this is ‘the season to be jolly’.

But it is not always so.

For whatever you might celebrate at this time of year, there are also some deeper seasonal undercurrents which may draw you down into a darker, more difficult space. Sorrow or pain may also be part of your personal end-of-year traditions. And amid all the gift-giving, these are the things that are rarely unwrapped…

There are so many reasons why this time of year might be challenging for you. Maybe this is the first year since a loved-one died. Maybe your closest relationship ended recently, or is in a painful place, and you’re feeling suddenly alone. Maybe your family ties are fractured, and it just feels too raw to be together. Perhaps a painful event happened around this time of year (and every year you feel you’re re-living its echoes). Maybe you or someone you love is facing a serious illness.

Or maybe you just plan on ‘doing the right thing’ and ‘keeping the peace’ by meeting others’ expectations and celebrating with particular people, when you’d secretly prefer to be anywhere but …

Whatever difficulties this time of year might hold for you, there are ways you can help lighten the load. And in the spirit of narrative and feminist therapies – which suggest that our own stories all have important wisdoms to share – here are some ideas which clients have previously shared, which they found useful. (They might work for you, too).

If sadness is in your life, it’s often a painful thing to be around. It aches. It tends to follow you. Or it wants to be carried. It usually whispers the painful stories over and over again so you keep remembering them (and re-living them anew).

So it seems natural to want a break from sadness every now and then. To want it to leave you alone for a while. To wish you didn’t feel it. To get it gone.

Yet it’s amazing how this can sometimes create an extra layer of challenge to deal with. Extra pain. Extra burden. For you can end up sort of feeling bad about feeling sad. (And now you’ve got two emotional companions following you around – or two things to carry).

So how else can you engage with sadness? How else can you find a way to be with it? Maybe even to learn from it?

This sign in the photo is about the usual tar and asphalt kind of roads. But it reminded me of the metaphorical roads to recovery we all travel on as well, at times.

Sometimes life can take us to places of great desolation: grief, heartache, hopelessness, regret, loss. And sometimes the only proper response is to just dwell in those places for a while. To absorb the landscape. To sit in the solitude. To simply take stock of where you find yourself just now.

But, when it feels right to start the process of recovery, how can you find a path back to that? How can you make your way out of the pain and back to other parts of your life? How might you walk towards your future?

Let’s explore that together for a moment.

It’s raining today and hundreds of droplets cover the windows of the train I’m in.

If you come in really close and look inside each raindrop on the pane, you can see a whole world captured in there – an upside-down and slightly refracted reflection of the world outside. So by looking into these liquid prisms, you’ll get a condensed, sometimes sharper or brighter vision of what’s going on.

Perhaps it’s the same with tears…

Maybe it’s possible to look into them in much the same way. To get in close to them and focus on what they, too, might reveal.

These sandstone statues decorate the outside of a cathedral in Nuremburg, Germany. They’re the seven virgins of something-or-rather (my memory has faded out the details). And, after some crumbling of the facade, one of them is pointing to the place her heart used to be. It’s missing. Broken off. Gone.

And now she stands with an emptiness, a square of pain that’s plainly visible.

Have you ever felt like this before? Where some piece of you was missing?

Maybe you lost something, or someone, that just seemed to fit your life, completed it in a way that nothing else quite can, and made it (and you) feel whole. And now they’ve vanished.

What do you do?