Dreamtime

As I drifted off to sleep last night, my heart hummed with a familiar warmth, and in its secret way sent out a quiet invitation to those nocturnal angels who watch over us at night. I found myself in one of those quasi-dream states in which most of me was dreaming, but there was a sliver of awareness that could witness what unfolds.
I was standing alone in the gauzy grey of twilight, underneath a large exterior deck of a familiar ski lodge from my childhood. I don’t know what I was doing there but the mood was expectant, preparatory. I was here for a reason. I then heard muted voices just above me and felt a slight shudder of nervous curiosity.

I became aware of a palpable quiver in my heart, which reminded me to pay attention. Drawn to the voices, I began to very slowly walk toward the outside staircase that connected the ground level to the upper deck. I hesitated before slowly taking the first few steps. The quiver intensified and a deep and unidentifiable sadness began to fill me.
“Just a few more steps,” said a gentle and guiding voice from inside me. I reached for the handrail and froze, gripped by a molten ball of growing grief in my chest. What is this? Who is this about? I thought. I paused briefly and, taking a deep breath, allowed the ancient but recognizable scent of sorrow to fill my chest.

Suddenly, all color disappeared and a veil of grainy black and white fell over the scene. Time lagged and the moment began to very slowly unzip itself, frame by frame, as though something important wanted to be revealed. I noticed that all extraneous sounds – other than the conversation on the deck – had vanished. Strangely, it felt like my perception was being mysteriously “adjusted” to allow for optimal receptivity.
“Just a couple more steps,” the voice whispered, “It’s OK.”

I took one step and, instantly recognizing the voice, my heart sank and gushed a flood of raw tears. It seemed Dreamtime had arranged a meeting with my beloved younger brother Pete who died almost five years ago, leaving an unfillable vacancy in the landscape of my life.

I stopped momentarily, as it had been quite a while since I’d been hit by a grief wave of this intensity. While deeply shaken by the impact, I noticed that some part of me remained tethered by a tiny filament to a non-dream awareness which said: stay, see, and feel. In such moments, the smallest dose of presence can offset the reflex to turn away and help us lean into the heat.

As the kaleidoscopic aperture of the dream slowed and opened, it revealed a guiding principle of how mindfulness helps us digest grief. Which is that our friendly attention softens the heart’s armoring, that our frozen pain can thaw in the light of kind observation. Bearing witness to our experience this way can help the tight fist of fear and holding to relax and open.

I paused and took a few more long breaths, anxiously trying to prepare for the moment when I would actually “see” him again. Somehow, I had the sense that, from this intra-dimensional view, we are only allowed to see into the “other side” as though through a one-way mirror. By sacred design, I would be able to see Pete, but he couldn’t see me. As I stood there trembling, I knew I lingered at one of those quickly passing portals built to transmit something precious to the deep corners of our soul.

I lifted my foot onto the final step and heard my inner dream guide remind me, “This moment will pass quickly. Be open to receiving whatever is there.”

Feeling like I was temporarily trespassing beyond some kind of cosmic curtain, I wanted to absorb every ounce of this extraordinary reunion while the door was open.
I took the last step up to the deck and tried to contain the tears that still shook me.

Turning to my left, there he was! Barely 20 feet away, sitting and chatting with a friend at a table. In a timeless flash, I was infused with the complete vibrational story of our precious brotherhood. As though six decades of joy, love, and laughter had magically condensed into a single of dollop of heart-honey whose nectar sweetened my soul. From this meta-view, I could see and feel directly into his essence and could freshly appreciate the snowflake unique being I knew/know as “Pete.”

Savoring this fleeting moment of wonderous liminal contact, my heart tremored with the special love we share/d. And inside of the slow-motion unfoldment of this dreamscape, I could behold the sacred symbiosis between grief and gratitude. I viscerally grokked the intimate and inextricable dance between love and loss – those eternal twin flames, flickering together, that sanctify the human heart.

I turned to descend the stairs and, feeling blessed by the great-fullness that comes when a veil is lifted, took one last long breath to absorb this holy moment. Reminded of my place in the larger web of things, I sensed the great gravity of goodness that both swims in our souls and spins the stars.

- Gyani Richards

In The Power of Hate, the Impact of Kindness, I shared about a cruel comment left on a video I posted. It was meant to celebrate strength after a limb difference diagnosis, but one hateful remark lingered longer than I expected.

I wrote the piece because it reminded me how much words matter. Hate can be sharp and loud. But kindness carries weight too. For every cruel voice, there were countless messages of support and love.

What moved me most was the choice in front of me. I cannot control what people say, but I can choose what shapes our story. I can choose compassion, advocacy, and to raise my son in a world where dignity is louder than hate.

- Anna Borle

What the Fire Made

an essay in survival



I have been broken in ways that don't show up on x-rays.

Not once. Not in one clean catastrophic moment I could point to and say, *there, that's where it happened.* But in layers, over decades, the way stone erodes. A childhood that taught me conditional love and called it God. A system that failed me when I did everything right. Children I couldn't reach across distances that weren't geographic. A body that kept showing up to a life that kept asking more than I thought I had left to give.

Most people who know me now see the poet. The coach. The man who sits with other people in their darkest seasons without flinching. They don't always see what it cost to become that person. What had to be burned away first.



I learned early that love has conditions.

That it arrives with fine print,
with a list of requirements,
with a door that locks
when you stop performing
whatever version of yourself
they needed you to be.

I spent years trying to pick that lock.
I spent more years understanding
there was nothing on the other side worth opening.



The first grief most of us carry is the grief of the family we were supposed to have. The love that was supposed to be unconditional and wasn't. The people who were supposed to show up and didn't. This grief doesn't come with a funeral or a casserole or a date you can point to on a calendar. It's the slow accumulation of absences. The gift that wasn't sent. The call that wasn't made. The moment you needed someone most and heard silence where a parent was supposed to be.

That grief shaped me before I had language for it.

Then life stacked more on top.

I lost children to circumstances I could not control. Not to death, but to distance, to systems, to the long corrosive work of years without access. If you have ever loved a child you couldn't reach, you know this particular grief has no clean edges. It doesn't resolve. It just becomes part of how you move through the world, carefully, with one hand always slightly outstretched.

I lost versions of myself. The man I thought I was supposed to be. The father I imagined I would be. The believer who thought doing the right thing guaranteed the right outcome. Each of those losses required mourning for something that wasn't a person. It was a future. An assumption. A story you'd been telling yourself about how your life would go.



And then there was Beth.



She arrived in my life and stayed for twenty-three years. She loved people exactly where they were. No performance required, no conditions attached. She was the antithesis of everything I had been taught love was, and she showed me, slowly, over years of watching her do it, what it actually looks like to love someone without an agenda.

She kept bees. She knew things about growing and tending and patience that I'm still learning.

She died last August.

It broke something fundamental. Not something that can be fixed. Something that has to be rebuilt differently, the way a bone that breaks badly heals carrying the record of the break forever, sometimes stronger at the fault line for it.

I have two teenagers at home who lost their mother. I watch them do the math every day, figuring out how to become people without her there to witness it. I am doing the same math. We are learning the same country together with no map.



Grief is not a river you cross.
It is not a valley you pass through.
It is not a season with a known end.

It is a country you move to.
And you will learn its seasons,
its particular quality of light in November,
the way certain songs mean something different now,
the way you reach for your phone
to tell someone something funny
and remember.

You will build a life in this country.
Not the life you had.
A different one.
Real and yours
and full of things worth staying for.



Transformation is not a reward for suffering. It is not something grief does to you automatically, the way heat is supposed to turn coal into diamonds. Plenty of people suffer and come out the other side diminished, hardened, closed.

The transformation I'm talking about is a choice. Made in the dark. Made when you can't see what you're choosing toward, only what you're choosing away from. Made badly and imperfectly and sometimes reversed and made again.

I had to choose, more than once, to stay. To keep showing up for children who needed a father when I had nothing left. To keep learning how to love people I had been failing. To keep writing when writing was the only thing that still told the truth. To keep getting out of bed in a house where someone was missing who had made it a home.

Those choices, accumulated over years, over losses, over failures and small corrections and trying again, that is what made me who I am.

Not the suffering. The choosing.

---

I am a poet. Over thirty years, over six thousand poems, every emotional landscape I have ever survived. I am a coach who sits with people in their hardest seasons because I have been in seasons like theirs. The grief. The betrayal. The systems that failed. The love that taught me better. The loss that recalibrated everything.

I did not arrive here clean or whole or finished.

I arrived here forged.

---

If you are in the fire right now,
it burns.
I won't tell you otherwise.

The person on the other side
is not a better version of who you were.
They are a different person.
Built from the same material
but shaped by what you survived.

Grief is permanent.
So is the person it makes you.

And love, the real kind,
the kind without conditions,
the kind I had to have modeled for me
by a woman who kept bees
and knew things about tending,

love is worth every broken thing
that taught you how to give it.

I survived this.
You can survive yours.

We are still here.
Still choosing.
Still becoming.



*Bear Sage is a poet, intuitive/empathic reader, and life coach with over thirty years of writing experience and more than a six thousand poems. They work with people navigating grief, trauma, and transformation from the Appalachian mountains.*

You can find more of his writing by subscribing to his BearSage Substack

- Near Sage

The Weatherman Winks

The alarm rings
like it always does.
Same pitch.
No mercy.

Morning settles in
with a cool and calm
I can’t afford.

Clothes changed.
Meds measured.
Syringes lined up
like an ellipsis
in a tired,
run-on sentence
running out
of action verbs.

Lift. Adjust.
Check the clock.
Check his breathing.
Check myself.
Again.

I used to laugh
at the weatherman
trapped in repetition
on Groundhog Day.

I still do—
but now I relate
to the cloudy nature
of it all.

Caregiving insists
on staying,
on asking the same questions
without remorse.

By noon
I swear I’ve lived
this lunch hour before—
the paperwork loop,
the calls that circle back
to nowhere,
the polite voices trained
not to hear urgency
or promise resolution.

Late afternoon stretches
like a hallway
that keeps adding
trap doors.

I feel the weight of yesterday
sitting inside today,
stacked neatly,
unpaid.

And still—
he smiles.

Not the kind
the movies cash in on.
A small, brave,
blink-and-you’ll-miss-it focus—
a moment he locks in
and says I’m here.
And so I stay.

Something shifts then.
Not the schedule.
Not the prognosis.
The light…

It sneaks in sideways—
through a window
I stopped looking at,
landing on his red curls.
The murky forecast clears.
The weatherman winks at me.

I realize the day
isn’t repeating.
I am.

And repetition,
handled with care,
becomes devotion.
Becomes proof.

Early evening exhales.
The sun lowers itself gently,
a gracious nod
to my revelation.

Tonight, I stand
in the afterglow.
Even the moonlight
feels earned.

Tomorrow,
it won’t matter
what the shadow says—
I’m choosing hope,
anyway.

- Chris B.