Grief and the Weeping Lass

The Weeping Lass (Scotland)
adaptation of "The Weeping Lass at the Dancin’ Place" :Twelve Black Cats by Sorche Nic Leods
Copyright©Czarnota 2008
No portion of this adaption may be recorded in any form without the author’s permission

There is a place where the young folk go to dance and laugh. Although Mary went there, she was not happy. While the others played at the games of love, Mary sat alone beneath an overhanging bush and wept. Every night it was the same.
Then one night, when the young people were well into there fun, a tall handsome stranger came. All the lasses danced with him, but Mary never noticed he was there. She didn’t notice when the dancing stopped and one by one in pairs and alone, the young people went home, and the stranger stood before her.
"Why does such a young and pretty lass sit alone and weep?"
"I weep for my love Jaime who’s gone off to sea and drowned."
"Well I knew your love Mary, it was months ago he left and it is time to get on with living. Come dance with me."
"I’ll dance with no other than my Jaime and he is gone."
Before Mary could say another word, the stranger took her hand and pulled her to her feet. He turned her in great circles. Little by little Mary looked up until she looked into his face. Well she knew those eyes, that nose. And the mouth she had kissed a hundred times. It was her own true love. Mary was overcome with joy and the two danced into the wee hours to music only they could hear.

But as morning drew near, Jaime said "I must be gone before daylight Mary." He whistled for his horse. A steed black as midnight came to the call.
"Oh no," said Mary. "Now that I’ve found you, I’ll never let you go."
"Mary, the house is cold and dark and small. You cannot come with me."
"But I will," she replied. And he had no choice but to put her behind him on the horse.
Jaime kicked the horse’s side and off they flew across the landscape. Or so it seemed to Mary that the horse’s hooves left the ground. Faster and faster they went until the world was a blur around them and Mary grew cold. She leaned closer to Jaime for warmth but he was cold and wet. And it was not raining!
As quickly as they had begun, the horse came to a halt inside the village cemetery. Mary knew the place for it was here she had erected a stone in memory of her Jaime. He slid from the horse and gave her a hand to help her down. His hand was cold and
pale and when Mary looked into his face she saw the once vibrant rosy cheeks were grey and sunken. Jaime pulled Mary to him and she struggled to free herself.
"Let go whoever you are!"
"I am your love," he said "And now that I’ve found you I’ll never let you go! No longer will you keep me awake with your weeping. No longer will you wet me with your tears."
Mary pulled and pushed and finally freed herself but the plaid shawl wrapped about her shoulders came loose in the deadman’s hands. Mary ran for the gate and he chased her. She could feel him on her heels but she never looked back. Just as Mary crossed the threshold, the sun rose over the trees and she fainted.
When Mary woke, she found herself in a safe warm bed with a fire burning in the kitchen beyond her door. An old couple had found her on the road and now heard her stir.
"You’re awake at last," said the old woman. "Tis good to see the color in your cheeks."
They explained to Mary how and where they had found her and she told them her story.
"Tsk," said the old woman. "We dream such strange things at times."
"Twas no dream," said Mary. "Go to the cemetery and find my shawl, then you’ll see."
It was plain to see there was arguing with her so the man took two of his friends to search in the cemetery. They found a scrap of plaid near a headstone. The stone read "Jaime, Beloved of Mary, Lost at Sea." They tried to pick up the cloth but it was buried in the earth.
They sent for the priest and the old man sent one of his friends to the shed to fetch a shovel. "We’ll dig it up."
And dug they did. They dug and dug until they came to the roots of an old tree that grew nearby.
"Look, it’s tangled in the roots," one man said.
"And more," said another. "It’s tangled in the fingers of a corpse!"
The priest helped give young Jaime a proper burial then they returned the shawl to its owner. Mary pressed it to her face. She breathed in the scent upon it.
It smelled like the earth. It smelled like the grave. Mary wrapped the shawl about her shoulders and went home, never to forget her love but never to weep for her Jaime again.

Grief is a real human emotion, the other side of joy. As with most things in life, we cannot have one without the other. We must have death to have life, night to have day, cold to have warmth. Contrast is the design of life.
Grieving has stages and each person will experience them in different ways and in different order. Some people will go through all stages of grief and others will skip. It has to do with coping skills, severity of loss, and distance from loss. Those at the center of the circle will feel it most and probably take longer to heal, but healing will come. If you worry about how you feel, know that grief is normal and natural and only really becomes a problem when it interferes with normal activity such as eating and sleeping or makes us ill. Even then, you can get help by talking about your grief, telling stories of the wonderful life of the one you lost so that you celebrate and honor all that made that person or pet or job or whatever, valuable. Sometimes it may be necessary to get professional help. Just know you are normal for these feelings. In fact, we should worry more about someone who does not feel this way after loss.
In her 1969 book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross defines the five stages of grief as Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. These are in a reasonable order of processing but some people will experience them in a different order.
Perhaps the most important thing I have learned about grief is that we do not have to experience it alone. We should not be afraid to allow ourselves the support and comfort of friends and family. If these people are not available to us, we also have clergy, teachers, counselors and many others to be there for us. Grief like life is a shared human experience.

Presence

Today’s lesson in archery class was follow-through. I teach students to anchor the draw in the same place each time for consistency, shoot, and freeze until the arrow hits the target before taking another arrow. Moving too fast makes us less accurate.
We can be so overwhelmed by our many tasks that we forget to be present in the moment and enjoy the fruits of our labors. This is simply going through the motions without presence. It is survival without living fully. Granted, licking a stamp and mailing a letter or washing another dirty dish may not be thrilling, but we can still do it with purpose and with presence. These mundane activities can help us transition into other more difficult tasks if we allow ourselves to use this time to focus only on what we are doing instead of our minds wandering to the past or what is next.
Enjoy those moments in life when you accomplish something, mundane or important, before moving on to the next thing. Listen to the arrow in the air, hear it land, see it quiver, feel the experience in your whole self, then go for the next one.

Courage and Fear

Courage and Fear, both are born from the same place. They begin with not knowing.

Heroes start the journey from that place of naivety, not knowing their own ability or what they might face. Nonetheless they throw themselves into it, as a moth dives into the fire. They cannot be afraid if they have no experience to make them so. “What we don’t know can’t hurt us.” This is the innocence of youth.
Yet on the other side of this innocence is fear of what we do not know. We become heroes when we discover fear and have the courage to surpass it. This takes little effort for some, but most of us will meet with setbacks, those who block us, and our own self-doubt. If we can just push beyond those things, the journey’s path will open before us and we may move forward.
These setbacks are the “riddles” the hero must answer in order to continue.

“Courage is not the absence of fear. It is going forward with the face of fear.” Abraham Lincoln

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” Eleanor Roosevelt