Eros & Grief

Eros and grief are interwoven, two forces moving through us, shaping the way we experience loss and connection.

A primary initiation of consciousness is the ability to hold non-Aristotelean thought—two things that seem to be contradictory being simultaneously true.

Fire isn’t real, and it burns. That paradox is where I live. 

It’s the nature of dependent origination, the way things arise together. Anyone who has done psychedelics knows this experience—that moment when distinctions blur and the mind no longer separates one thing from another.

That is a world—an entire world of experience beyond good and bad, beyond the binaries we cling to. The taste of everything as one. That world exists within each of us, humming in the background of our awareness.

It is how we stay upright in a place as dark as grief can be, full of storms and waves that threaten to pull us under. 

Some part of consciousness must always remain rooted in the beauty and perfection of all things—because without that, how could we bear it?

I understand why they turn to SSRIs, distractions, anything to blunt the edges—because to be fully present without this sense of vastness, without this open-eyed knowing, would be unbearable.

And yet, presence is not detachment.

Suzuki Roshi once said it is best to move through the world as if in darkness, touching everything, staying sensitive to each thing we encounter. Because if we retreat fully into the idea that it’s all a dream, we lose the ability to meet life as it is.

Someone comes to you and says, My mother died, and you, floating above it all, say, It’s just a dream, man. That is not presence. That is evasion.

If your vow is to end suffering, then the how is intimacy.

To truly meet the world, you must be willing to be inside of it—to feel everything, to let it move through you. This is the work: to take in the suffering of another as your own, to allow it to crack you open while still holding the ground beneath you. To meet grief with grief, but not collapse into it. To hold sorrow without trying to steer it, without contrivance or avoidance.

What we often call grieving is something else entirely. Just as what we call love is often hate, what we call grief is often regret. It is performance, drama, the echo of what we did not do while that person was alive.

Eros teaches a different way. To train ourselves to be fully in the moment, unimpeded by residue.

I live as if I will die tomorrow. I refuse to leave anything unsaid, to allow even the smallest tension to linger.I do this with the desire for everything to be open, fluid, and unblocked in my life to stay that intimate.

Real grieving is not something that happens after a death—it happens now, in real time. It happens by living inside the dying process, by refusing to look away from the fact that every relationship is a temporary one. That, at some point, one of us will leave the other.

How do you love inside of that knowledge? How do you live with that heartbreak—not as an idea, but as a reality? That is the work of grief.

There is another story I love involving Suzuki Roshi. Trungpa Rinpoche, one of my favorite teachers, attended the funeral of Suzuki Roshi. He loved him so much that when Roshi died, he collapsed in grief. They say he wailed, that he cried so hard he wept blood.

That is uncontrived grief—grief that is alive, that erupts from the body without performance. That is Eros. 

And yet, grief is not always loud. When one of the most important people in my life died a year and a half ago, I braced myself, waiting for the collapse. But it didn’t come. Instead, I felt something I didn’t expect—a profound relief. Not my own, but theirs. Whenever I placed my attention there, I did not feel loss; I felt their release. To impose my own sorrow onto them, to insist on grieving in a way that did not match their experience, would be an act of ego. It would be imposing my will onto their journey. And I do not want to do that. So I grieve by feeling them as they are now, wherever they are.

That is my mourning—not clinging to the absence, but being inside the connection that remains.

Every death is different. Every loss carves a different shape in the heart. Sometimes, grief knocks the breath from you. Other times, it is quiet. But in all cases, the work remains the same: to meet what is, fully and without resistance. To let it move through you, unimpeded. To love inside of loss, without trying to change it.

That is intimacy. That is Eros. That is how we live inside the dying.