Wasting Your Sweetness

A friend is taking the journey from this world and she is doing this consciously and with great courage and openness. Her family and all her friends are supporting her in this and she is making use of a wonderful project called ‘What Matters Now’ which allows everyone, wherever they are in the world, to keep up to date, to share messages, to contribute photos and films and so on. It’s a lovely way to stay in touch and still respect that person’s need for privacy, time and space. And it feels like all of us, as a community around her, are learning so much from this.

Just recently a friend posted this on the site. What a beautiful image that makes ‘wasting sweetness’ glorious in its generosity:

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
– Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum