…reflecting on the ebbs and flows of grief and love by stacey james mcadoo…
Grief is a crazy thing. Sometimes it needs to sit outside in the quiet, and sometimes it needs to come inside where it’s warm and surrounded by love.
I got these singing bowls a year or so ago when I was still living with my momma having my broken heart mended. It was right after the death of my son and the very sudden, public uprooting of my family. It’s been a while since I’ve played them because after I had the patio area built, I took them outside thinking that would be the zen place where I played them. But they didn’t like being outside and refused to play sound (like for real, for real). So I brought them in and decided they would just be for decoration—because for real, they wouldn’t produce any sound even after I brought them back in.
One day recently, I decided to give them a play again. And they started singing. So I guess they just don’t like being outside. My guess is it’s a temperature thing, though my heart wants to think they just like being in my living room where I’m surrounded by orange love, peace, and reminders of Norel.
Looking around this room, every item placed in here is intentional. And every corner… every inch of this room… makes my heart smile. Right behind the bowls sits the cast of our hands immortalized from back in the Riverfest days (I’m still waiting on Leron to paint them the color of our actual hands twenty-something years later)! Sandwiched between Leron and Norel’s hands is an orange butterfly, one of my daughter’s favorite creatures (and Norel’s favorite color), holding space as a quiet reminder of the eternal depth of their love.
There is something special about how objects wait for us. They hold our memories when we aren’t strong enough to carry them all, sitting quietly until we are ready to pay attention again.
Something fascinating happened this morning when I was playing the bowls. I thought the music was about to stop because the resonance was dying down and the sound was beginning to fade into silence. But when I switched directions with the mallet, the vibration caught again, and the music started right back up.
I know there’s a deeper meaning in that… I just haven’t figured it all out yet.
I’m thinking maybe that’s what grief and healing are really about. For instance, I’ve been feeling “soul-tired” this week in particular… completely depleted and operating with full-on “grief brain” (slower to comprehend, more forgetful, and easily distracted), alongside physical aches and pains in my body.
So perhaps this morning’s insight was a Godwink… a reminder that when we feel like our momentum is ending, when the noise fades, and when we think we’ve run out of sound, we don’t necessarily have to stop.
Maybe we just need to make a subtle pivot. A change in angle, a shift in movement, move to a different location or bring ourselves back into a room filled with love so that the music can return, louder and clearer than before.
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Stacey McAdoo, the 2019 Arkansas Teacher of the Year, has dedicated over twenty years to advocating for traditionally underrepresented students and educators. Her relationship-based approach to education is featured in the award-winning Arkansas PBS docuseries Closing the Opportunity Gap and her specialized course, Coaching Self-Expression: Go-In Poet.
As the founder of the Writeous Poets (a spoken word and youth advocacy collective) and an expert professional development facilitator, Stacey designs transformative sessions centered on arts integration, equity, and empowerment. She currently serves as a professor at Reach University and the national Managing Director of Learning & Development for Teach Plus. Additionally, she is the host of the A Mile In My Shoes: The Walk & Talk Podcast and the founder of Still Standing: The Practice, a community for resilient women who, to the world’s astonishment and surprise, continue to stand and thrive despite life’s most unimaginable challenges. She also host weekly free grief circles for the community through the Central Arkansas Library System.
