Pushing and Grieving a Dead Dream

How a Mother Orca teaches us how to let go....

As we are on the beginning threshold of a New Year, there is a mother Orca whale named Tahlequah or J35 swimming in the Pacific Ocean pushing her dead baby calf’s carcass through the cold, salty waters. The baby was born dead but the mother whale is grieving so much that she cannot let the baby go. It’s been 18 days as of today that she has methodically cared for the baby’s body—perhaps secretly hoping the baby might just come back to life if she could just do something else—something more. What makes the true story even more sad is that this same thing happened in 2018 and Tahlequah could not release her attachment to a deep loss for another long season.

Repeated losses in our lives makes everything even more heavy. What do we do when we seem stuck in our losses; stuck in our “what could have been” moments of our lives? What do we do when we still carry illusions of a life we dreamed, but can never be realized now? How do we go on?

There is much to consider in this—in holding the hope of a new beginning while pushing a dead dream forward in our own private oceans of lament and loss.

This is the peril of Fontaine in her raw, yet honest song in Les Miserables when she sang of her grief in “I had a dream:”

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream
I dreamed.

Every time, I read Fontaine’s lament, I’m moved and every time I listen to the song itself, I cry—every time. Why? Because Fontaine’s song is our song. She gives words to dreams and people and events that have been killed somehow.

Somewhere and sometime in the next few days, the Orca whale, J 35 will let go of the calve’s body. It will be a release---a letting go—an acceptance that will bring her a new beginning. She may not even know of a new beginning or perhaps not even want one. But she will come to the place of her bell curve of lamenting that something just must change in order to go on.

New beginnings have a sort of bell curve to them. It’s such a struggle to get one’s self over the hump of the curve. Some of us might try, but feel stuck in our acceptance that we can’t get to the other side of the bell curve. Release and beginning again, do not follow a metric or a 7 step process. Some of us are slower to release, some of us stay stuck and some of us grieve, let go and begin again with glimmers of hope.

What is important is to notice where you are on the bell curve…. And to consider moving into your own new beginning still carrying the load of a dream that will never be, while swimming against the current of launching out now in the beginning that awaits us.

I keep falling back into the words, “Give time, time.” That must be what J35 is doing right now. She is giving time, time in her new beginning as she pushes her dead baby across the miles and miles of the Pacific. And this is what some of us choose to do. To just say for the New Beginning, “I’m going to choose to give time, time until I feel an inner nudge that says, “Now. Now just let go and go on!”

Perhaps, it’s time to let something go so that a new beginning could be possible.

What I know about this is this: To ask yourself:

Is it time to keep pushing with my grief or can I release some or part of it now in order to swim with more freedom, holding a love in my heart, but opening myself up for possibilities one more time?

What is it that you are pushing in our own ocean? That seems to be an important question to sit with these days as well. To know what it is—rather than living in the blues or an unnamed grief could actually bring relief and a sort of push over the bell curve.

There is no poem that invites us to consider our New BEgnnings more than from the heart and pen of John O’Donohue. I’d suggest reading this poem and read it several times—sitting with words or sentences until you see yourself on the bell curve of your own New Beginning. Then, and just maybe, courage will kindle to let something go, let someone go—so that your eyes can become young again and the release might just feel a bit like practicing your own resurrection.

Here’s the poem.

For a New Beginning
by John O'Donohue


In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life's desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.


johnodonohue.com

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What is the one line of O'Donohue's poem that strikes you the most?

If you'd like to join me on January 6 at Noon, EST, Peter Ivey and I will be leading a 2 hour lunch time retreat on New Beginnings. There's still room for a few more! Click here! We will begin our time considering O'Donohue's poem and also reflect upon the past 12 months of our lives as we stand on the threshold of a  new beginning.