Meditation: Oct 17th, 2025

Find a place where something has been taken away—a empty branch where a nest once was, a gap in a fence, a bare patch where flowers grew, a doorway that opens to nothing. Stand in the space of absence. Reach your hand toward what is no longer there. Let your fingers close on emptiness. Hold that gesture. Feel the ache in your arm from reaching for what cannot be grasped. Lower your hand slowly. Notice how the emptiness remains, how it has shape and weight despite being nothing.

“The Mother is as present in what has been removed as in what remains. The hollow in the tree is as much the tree as the wood surrounding it.”

A Mhàthair nam Beàrnan — Mother of the Gaps — I come to you on this October Friday when the week empties itself toward weekend, when the light continues its retreat, when the seventeenth day marks the midpoint of the month’s slow dying. The air tastes metallic, like old blood or coming rain. The clouds hang low and swollen, pregnant with weather they will not yet release.

Tha mi bronach, tha mi lan-chridheach — I am grieving, I am wholehearted — and I cannot understand how both can be true simultaneously. The grief is an ocean, vast and deep and cold. It pulls at my legs like undertow. It fills my chest cavity until there is no room for breath. Everything I have lost rises up to meet me: faces, chances, versions of myself I will never be, futures that died before they could be born.

But there is also this fullness. This strange, aching wholeness. As if the grief has carved me out so completely that I am finally large enough to hold everything—the love and the loss, the presence and the absence, the joy that was and the sorrow that remains. Wholehearted not despite the breaking, but because of it.

Tha an talamh falamh — The earth is empty.

Look at October’s fields: stubble and bare soil. Look at the trees: mostly naked now, their architecture exposed. Look at the nests revealed in the stripped branches: empty cradles where life was raised and then departed. Everything has been taken. Everything has left. And yet the land continues. The trees continue. The emptiness itself is a kind of fullness.

Cum mo bhròn, a Mhàthair — Hold my grief, Mother — and hold also the wholeness that grief has made possible.

Physical Direction: Place both hands over your heart. Press firmly. Feel the beating beneath your palms. Now slide your hands apart slowly until your arms are stretched wide, as if opening a great space in your chest. Hold this openness. Let the air touch the vulnerable center of you. This is what grief does—it breaks you open.

The grief has a specific taste, a particular texture. It is the feeling of reaching for someone who is not there and will never be there again. It is the phantom weight of what you once carried. It is waking up and remembering—freshly, terribly—what you have lost. It is the loneliness of being the only one who remembers certain details, certain moments, certain small sacred things that died when the person or dream or possibility died.

Tha bròn na amar dhomhain — Grief is a deep hollow.

And nature knows this hollowing. The Mother knows absence intimately. Every autumn is a small death, a practicing for the final one. The tree releases its leaves—not accidentally, not carelessly, but deliberately. She cuts them loose, seals the wound, stands naked in the wind. This is controlled loss. This is chosen grief. The tree grieves her leaves every year and stands in the emptiness of that grief all winter long.

But watch what the emptiness does: it allows the tree to survive. The leaves would collect snow, would break the branches with their weight. The loss is what makes continuation possible. The grief is what allows life to go on.

Ach tha làn-chridhe ann cuideachd — But there is also wholeheartedness.

Strange word for this feeling. Wholehearted. It means: with the entire heart. Nothing held back. Complete. Full. And this is what grief has done to you—it has forced you to feel with your whole heart, not just the happy parts, not just the safe parts, but all of it. The grief has made you larger. It has opened spaces in you that you did not know existed.

Tha a’ Mhàthair a’ teagasg — The Mother teaches — that the hollow tree is often stronger than the solid one. That the empty space at the heart allows for flexibility, allows the wind to pass through rather than pushing the tree over. Your grief has hollowed you, yes. But it has made you capable of holding more than you ever could when you were solid and unbroken.

To be wholehearted in grief is to refuse to protect yourself from feeling. It is to let the loss be as large as it actually is. It is to honor what is gone by feeling the full weight of its absence. This is not weakness. This is courage. This is the difference between surviving and living.

Physical Direction: Kneel or sit and begin to gather small things around you—stones, twigs, leaves, whatever is near. Arrange them in a circle. Then remove them one by one, placing each gently aside. Feel the circle empty. See how the space where they were remains visible, outlined by absence. This is memorial. This is how we hold what has left.

Why does nature insist on loss? Why must everything beautiful be temporary? Why must every summer end in autumn, every autumn in winter, every life in death? Because permanence is stagnation. Because change requires release. Because love means letting go, again and again and again.

Tha gaol agus bròn aon rud — Love and grief are one thing.

You grieve because you loved. You grieve in proportion to what mattered. Your grief is the measure of what was real, what was important, what changed you irreversibly. To refuse grief is to refuse love. To wall yourself off from loss is to wall yourself off from connection. The Mother does not protect herself this way. She loves fully, loses completely, and continues anyway.

Seall air a’ chraobh — Look at the tree.

Every year she gives herself completely to her leaves. She pours resources into them, makes food with them, breathes through them. They are her children, her work, her purpose. And every year she lets them go. Cuts them off. Watches them die. And the grief of this—if trees feel grief—must be immense. But she does it anyway. She loves them anyway. She makes new leaves anyway.

This is wholeheartedness in the face of inevitable loss. This is saying: I will love even though I know it will end. I will invest fully even though the return is temporary. I will give my whole heart even though my whole heart will break.

Tha thu slàn nad bhriseadh — You are whole in your breaking.

The grief has not diminished you. It has revealed your capacity. Every person you grieve represents a successful love. Every loss you carry proves you are capable of connection. Every absence that aches is evidence that you let someone or something matter enough to change you.

The Mother’s healing is not the removal of grief—it is the expansion of your ability to hold it. She does not take away the absence. She shows you that you are large enough to contain both the emptiness and the fullness, both the loss and the love that caused it.

Leig leis a’ bhròn a bhith làn-chridheach — Let the grief be wholehearted.

Do not minimize it. Do not rush it. Do not apologize for how long it takes or how deeply it goes. Grieve with your whole heart because you loved with your whole heart. This is integrity. This is honoring what was by refusing to pretend it didn’t matter.

And in the hollowing, in the emptying, you will find you are not diminished but deepened. You will find you can hold more joy because you have learned to hold more sorrow. You will find the tree stands through winter and waits—not for the pain to end, but for spring to show that love is worth the risk of loss, again and again and again.

A’ Mhàthair a’ cumail gach rud — The Mother holds everything — your grief and your wholeness, your emptiness and your fullness, your breaking and your unbroken capacity to love again.

Take a moment to contemplate:

What if your grief is not something to heal from but something to honor fully? What if being wholehearted means feeling everything—the loss and the love—with equal intensity? Can you be both broken by absence and made whole by your capacity to feel it deeply?

Beannachd na Màthair Chaoimhneil ort — The Tender Mother’s blessing upon you — who grieves with your whole heart because you loved with your whole heart.

Mar a sheasas a’ chraobh nochdte — As the tree stands naked — may you stand in your grief without shame, knowing emptiness is not the same as hollowness.

Mar a tha beàrn a’ cumail cuimhne — As the gap holds memory — may your absence-spaces honor what was there by feeling the loss fully.

Rach le cridhe slàn — Go with whole heart — knowing that grief is love’s echo, that loss is connection’s shadow, that to be broken open by absence is to be large enough to hold both love and loss as sacred.

Tha do bhròn nad neart — Your grief is your strength.

The empty branch holds the shape of the nest that was. The tree stands naked and unashamed. You are both broken and whole. Trust this.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​