Grief and loss are perhaps the most impactful experiences we ever have. Falling in love is likely the closest competitor. I don’t know how you compare the effects they have upon us, seemingly so opposite. It would be interesting to know which subject comes up more often in poetry. It’s likely a close contest.

Grief can shatter some people, paralyzing them or worse. We are all aware of the phenomenon of married couples dying within months or even weeks of each other. It happened to my mother’s parents. Others continue on after a great loss yet, as they themselves may say, it seems they’re just going through the motions.

Others, however, even after experiencing deep pain, somehow transcend their loss and find a renewed energy to live life again. Poet and photographer Rebecca Norris Webb writes in a New York Times’ essay, “The Badlands Hold Me as I Grieve”, about how she has come to deal with the loss, years apart, of both of her identical twin brothers, and then more recently, her centenarian father.

“I have a kind of game I play with grief, imagining the birds I see are the people I’ve lost.” Continuing her father’s deep appreciation of nature, Norris Webb combines birding with her photography. Loosely connecting personality traits with some avian characteristic, she identifies someone she has lost with a bird species.

My brother Dave is a belted kingfisher (shared quirky fashion sense); his twin, Mike, is a Townsend’s solitaire (complicated yet unforgettable song). Seeing either of these species while out birding in South Dakota makes me smile — that same half-smile of my brothers’ that often accompanied their gently teasing senses of humor.

Place also has the ability to uphold and renew. In Norris Webb’s case, it’s the wide—and wild—open spaces of South Dakota, where she was raised.

That first fall after my brother Dave died in 2006, I wandered restlessly through the prairies and Badlands of South Dakota and photographed. Frame by frame, I focused on a flock of blackbirds in a field of sunflowers, a bison in my car’s rearview mirror, as I learned to navigate my first loss of an immediate family member. Frame by frame, it was as if the Great Plains held in my viewfinder also held me.

Over the years, I’ve continued to find solace in the space and silence and solitude of the northern Great Plains, with their ever-shifting weather and high winds that seem to come out of nowhere.

Hearing Norris Webb’s experience, the mystics would nod and smile. For them, the essential truth is that all is One. Identifying a lost loved one with a particular bird is a perfectly acceptable way of reminding ourselves that their essence continues, even if their previous form does not.

Conceptually dividing up the world into countless parts is essential for us to make our way in it. Applied by science, it has given us our modern lives. Mystics understand that. The mistake we make, however, is to not recognize the fundamental unity that transcends the everchanging forms of reality, including of ourselves and our fellow human beings.

Paradoxically, grief testifies both to the reality of that oneness and to our illusion that it doesn’t exist. The pain we feal at a loss arises from our awareness of having some real part of us cut off. What we don’t recognize is that the union we felt extends beyond the form of our human individuality.

Recognizing our oneness with another person can happen in many ways, but we usually know them as experiences of friendship or love. In both cases, we recognize something of ourselves in the other, and sense that they see themselves in us. There is a joy in feeling our aloneness transcended as we think and feel, “They know me, and I know them.”

Such experiences can happen with anyone, anywhere. For several years I was on staff for a church teen summer “Leadership Lab”, and every year the experience was the same. At the first meeting on Sunday night, a few hundred teens from across the state would gather in near silence and more than a little suspicion. Then at the last gathering the following Saturday morning, the crowd would be suffused with hugs and tears, as these former strangers grieved the coming separation from their new friendships created in less than a week.

But the experience of oneness goes beyond our fellow humans into the natural world. It’s obvious now that our prehistoric ancestors felt a profound connection with the animals around them, with the earliest art almost always featuring animal as well as human figures. We have had dogs and cats with us for millennia. How could such a habit last so long, even to the present day? Many grieve the loss of a pet as deeply as that of another human being. Looking into the eyes of an animal can be deeply moving, often calming and unsettling at the same time.

What Rebecca Norris Webb’s experience shows is that it doesn’t take deep philosophy or mystical experience to fully live after loss. Grief is inevitable but the world around us gives us the means to heal. She quotes a few lines of a favorite poet, Tomas Tranströmer.

And what is empty turns its face to us
and whispers:
“I am not empty, I am open.”

Many experience grief as an emptiness that seemingly can never be filled. Nature, both its creatures and magnificent spaces, can offer itself to us as a healing presence to reconnect us with life and existence if we are open to it. Norris Webb’s identifying her lost loved ones with familiar creatures she encounters is one way to recognize the profound continuity of life that is all around us.

A theme of all the great religious teachers is that of letting go. “You must lose your life in order to find it,” Jesus says. Over time, we eventually realize the pain of our grief is our body’s way of telling us to let go of forms that are no more. Only when we do so do we recognize the formless reality that is never lost and is present within and all around us. It is that Oneness which brought us into to being in the first place, and which is present any time, wherever we look: in the landscape that surrounds us, in a bird singing in a tree, in the cat in our lap, or in the next person we meet.

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