Grief arrives quietly.

She does not announce her debut

with clanging cymbals and flashy banners.

She simply settles in,

seeking comfort and warmth in the rooms

your body has prepared for her.

She is not the villain your mind has painted

in dark grey, shadowy images.

She is an honored guest

who has chosen you to house her for a season;

to make space for her to move freely and find her footing.

She speaks in kind, simple whispers:

Rest, receive.

Notice the part of you that still

Turns toward the sunlight.

That is the part of you who remembers

That, in the most expanded sense, nothing has gone wrong.

This season—as hard as it may feel—is not a mistake.

Beyond the mind’s resistance and objections,

Grief is Life itself

moving through the open doorway of a tender heart.

She does not come to punish you,

but to soften you.

To remind you

that the heart was never meant

to close around what it cannot keep.

And slowly, in her own time,

she teaches you how to touch

the truest depths of love and joy.

In the end,

Grief is the receipt for love.

_{~missy Maiorano 2026}

Back in the summer of 2017, I had a conversation with one of my dearest friends about a season of depression she was going through. She painted a picture of unexplainable fatigue and persistent, dull body aches. There was an inability to be in love with all the things that had once brought her immense joy. She wasn’t a crier, so there weren’t those hallmark signs of grief that my mind thought there should be. In fact, my adorable little mind, at the time, could not comprehend any of what my friend was describing to me.

“Just don’t be depressed,” I thought to myself. “It can’t be that hard to just stop, right? All you have to do is think happier thoughts. Focus on the good.”

Little did I know at the time that, that right on cue, Life would be showing up within me as my own season of what our world calls depression. Sometime during the early part of 2018, several months into my chronic hives season, a fog descended. It was so subtle. It took a while for me to even notice my inability to do some basic things that had once brought me such delight.

One morning as winter flirted with spring, I sat at my desk in my home office while birds outside my window san their morning song. The only story that played in my mind was something along the lines of, “That is the most depressing noise. I wish the birds would go away.” Beneath that mind-created narrative, there was a raw feeling of heaviness and “grey” throughout my body. For many months—through spring and summer and into the fall—that same story played in the background of my mind whenever the birds sang. For me, at the time, it was a reminder that the rest of the world was still singing, still soaring high in the sky, while I stayed still, quiet, and tethered to the ground.

Somehow—and I will never fully understand how—the dense fog of early 2018 eventually lifted in the same quiet, mysterious way in which it had descended. Without fanfare or drama, the birds’ morning songs felt light and joyful again. None of this was the result of a particular practice or a specific teaching. It was simply the organic unfolding of Life. One season blurring into the next and then into the next, again.

There was an overall softening of the belief that one type of season is good and right—while another is wrong and bad.

For every one of us, there are seasons in life that arrive quietly, without asking permission or announcing themselves in any obvious way. They rarely follow the neat timelines we imagine they should. They don’t wait until we’re ready, and they certainly don’t ask permission to come into our midst.

I think of these seasons like the colorful leaves that fall to the ground in autumn. One day, enough leaves have gathered on the ground that we notice them. But long before we noticed, they were already falling.

And perhaps this is part of the human experience that we do not speak about nearly enough—the part in which something old is gently falling away before the something new has come into view.

I’d like for us to consider that what our culture has taught us to believe about grief, sorrow, or the thing we call depression might not be at all what is actually unfolding.

To a mind—evolutionarily designed for protection through control—a tender season is evidence that something is wrong—that something needs mending or figuring out. A quieter season becomes proof that we are falling behind. And before long, we can find ourselves believing that because we are struggling, or grieving, or moving more slowly than we once did, we must somehow be failing at life.

The adorable human mind, doing what it has been evolutionarily conditioned to do, interprets and creates wildly hypnotic narratives and meanings about the simple flow of seasons. The simple movement of energy in the body. It reaches for explanations and evidence so that it can solidify a greater narrative of failure, problem, and hopelessness.

A series of questions may begin to arise such as what is wrong with me, why can’t I just snap out of this, other people seem to be doing life just fine, so why does this feel so hard for me? And before long, what may have begun as a natural, human season becomes layered with a quiet story of collapse, a sense that somehow you are not keeping up, that you are falling behind in a race you never consciously agreed to run.

It is worth pausing here, because this a mind’s interpretation—NOT the TRUTH. It is a learned lens, one that has been shaped over time by a world that often measures worth through movement, productivity, and visible progress. But there are seasons in life that are not about progress, not about growth in the way we tend to define it, and not about becoming more or doing more. These seasons are about something far more subtle and, in many ways, far more courageous.

And perhaps this is where grief begins to change us in ways the mind could never have anticipated. Perhaps this is where we can begin to hold two seemingly opposite things together in one place. Ache and Joy. Sorrow and Peace. Numbness and Safety.

Little by little, through the experience of loving and losing, of holding and releasing, something begins to loosen the grip of our fingers on the proverbial steering wheel. Something in us begins to open to the idea that people, experiences, and seasons of life were never meant to remain fixed or certain. We begin to see with fresh eyes and a more expanded aperture that Life itself is the only thing that is steady, constant, and timeless.

And this can feel incredibly vulnerable at first. The mind wants solidity. It wants guarantees. It wants to know that the people we love will remain, that the moments we cherish can somehow be preserved, that the versions of ourselves we have grown attached to will stay intact forever.

And yet Life, over and over again, gently reveals the fleeting nature of all form. Seasons change. Bodies change. Relationships evolve. Experiences arrive and disappear. Entire chapters of our lives shift from one seamlessly into the next, mostly unnoticed.

What if there is nothing inherently awful or hopeless or even sad about ANY of this?

What if the only actual suffering is in the misunderstanding of our relationship to all that is fleeting?

What if seasons of grief, sorrow, or even hopelessness, are not something to manage or control? What if they are here to help grow our capacity to trust what the mind cannot see, know, or understand? What if these seasons, which move through ALL of us from time to time, are here to help us begin to move beyond the mind’s immediate interpretations of good or bad, right or wrong?

What if grief itself is part of the sacred curriculum of being human? Not evidence that life has betrayed us, but evidence that we have fully entered the experience of loving.

Maybe we are not here to avoid the human experience, but to fully inhabit it. To collect all of it. The joy and the ache. The wonder and the uncertainty. The arrivals and the endings. After all, these experiences, as powerful as they are, are still momentary movements passing through awareness. They are real, they matter, and they touch us deeply. But, by design, they are fleeting by nature. They were never meant to stay.

But something in you is not fleeting.

Something in you has been quietly present through every season you have ever lived. Through every version of yourself. Through every heartbreak, every celebration, every loss, every beginning. There is a timelessness within you, a spaciousness that can hold even the most tender human experiences without being destroyed by them.

And perhaps this is one of grief’s quiet invitations. Not to harden against loss, but to rediscover what is still here even as life continues to change from one form to the next. To discover that while the human heart was never meant to cling to what is fleeting, it was absolutely designed to love deeply while it is here.

And maybe that is why grief, uncomfortable or painful as it may seem, so often opens people into a much deeper, RICHER experience of the human journey here on earth.

So many of us have learned to relate to life as though it is something to be won, something where we are constantly and often unconsciously evaluating where we stand. We measure ourselves against an invisible standard, asking if we are doing enough, moving fast enough, arriving where we are supposed to be by now. And when we find ourselves in one of these tender seasons, Life itself can finally open a door through which we will discover a deeper truth about what it means to matter—what it means to be lived—to be moved flawlessly through every chapter and season of this little human lifetime.

What if, beyond the mind’s hypnotic stories of “It shouldn’t be like this” or “I want my old life back” or “This is not the person I used to be,” there is an opening for something so much more loving and freeing?

And perhaps this is where we begin, not by demanding that we open fully to grief all at once, not by forcing closeness before the system is ready, but by simply becoming willing to sit in the same room with what we have spent so long trying to outrun.

Maybe, at first, grief does not sit beside us at the table. Maybe we are not yet ready to invite her close enough for conversation. Maybe she simply exists quietly across the room, and for now, all we can offer is the gentlest acknowledgment: I see you there.

And maybe that is enough.

Perhaps healing does not begin with dramatic breakthroughs or profound moments of transcendence, but with the smallest softening of resistance. A willingness to remain present for one moment longer than we normally would. A willingness to let grief exist without immediately trying to fix it, solve it, analyze it, silence it, or turn it into a problem that needs managing.

Because the mind will likely continue doing what minds do. It will continue producing loud and convincing narratives about what this feeling means, about how long it has lasted, about what should be different by now.

None of that has to disappear before true freedom and peace can unfold. The mind can continue speaking in its dramatic, urgent voice while something deeper in you quietly experiments with a new posture.

Not a posture of surrender in the sense of giving up, but a posture of openness. Curiosity. Gentle companionship.

What if nothing needs to change in this moment for something expansive and loving to already be unfolding within us?

Sometimes the deepest transformation begins long before grief disappears. It begins when we simply notice the mind’s narrative about what our grief MEANS. And instead of collapsing into that narrative, we open to the possibility that even this season is in service of us—in service of something our adorable little minds will never understand.