She walked the river path most evenings that winter, not because it helped but because standing still was worse. Someone had called. One of those calls. And after, the world kept going: cars, grocery receipts, someone’s dog running loose across a parking lot; all of it obscene somehow, all of it carrying on. She wasn’t looking for anything by the water. That’s important. She wasn’t ready to be comforted. But one night she stopped because children were laughing somewhere behind the trees, that high-pitched, stupid laughter that means nothing except the body is young and doesn’t know yet— and she felt it move through her like a current through cold ground, brief, almost painful, nothing like happiness. More like a door she hadn’t noticed because she’d been pressing so hard against the wall beside it. Months passed. She doesn’t talk about it as a transformation. She’ll tell you she still has bad mornings, still picks up her phone to call a number that goes nowhere. But she started sitting with people differently—her neighbor whose husband left in February, a girl at work who smiled too much and meant none of it. She recognized something. Knew what to bring, what not to say. She had room now, is all. Room she hadn’t asked for, hadn’t earned exactly, merely found herself holding. That’s what Gibran meant, maybe. Not that grief is worth it. Not that. Only that it goes somewhere, takes up space inside you, and when it moves, if it moves, it leaves something behind that wasn’t there before. A hollow. Wide enough to contain joy, to let someone else in.
Author’s Note
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.—Kahlil Gibran—“The Prophet”
I first read The Prophet in my late teens. I’ve gone back to it several times since, and for a long time Gibran’s line about sorrow and joy was just words my eyes moved across. Not bad words. Just words that hadn’t found anything in me to catch on yet.
That’s how some lines work. They wait.
You have to live enough, lose enough, before the language has somewhere to land. And then one day you’re reading the same sentence you’ve read before, when it hits you, and you think, oh … that’s what that meant.
I’m in my sixties now. I understand the line differently than I would have at twenty, or thirty-five, or forty-five, or even fifty. Not better, necessarily. Just from the inside rather than the outside.
The woman in this poem isn’t healed. She hasn’t arrived anywhere. She just has more room than she used to, and she didn’t choose that, and she’s learning, slowly, imperfectly, what to do with it.
I think that’s closer to how grief actually works than any metaphor about dancing in the rain.
Upcoming…
An update to a poem (one day before the 250th anniversary of U.S. Independence):
HISTORY’S SHADOWS, 03 July 2026
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