Rayya Elias and Elizabeth Gilbert (Photograph by Elizabeth Gilbert) How to move through this barely survivable experience is what author and altogether glorious human being Elizabeth Gilbert examines with uncommon insight and tenderness of heart in her conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson on the inaugural episode of the TED Interviews podcast. It is only when we give ourselves over to it completely that we can begin to take ourselves back, to rise, to live again. We are made “of the earth” - we bow down low, we become crust, and each breath seems to draw from the magmatic center of the planet that is our being. ”īut we also gain something - out of the burning embers of the loss arises an ashen humility, true to its shared Latin root with the word humus. We lose what artist Anne Truitt so poetically termed “the lovely entire confidence that comes only from innumerable mutual confidences entrusted and examined… woven by four hands, now trembling, now intent, over and under into a pattern that can surprise both. When love is lost, we lose the part of ourselves that did the loving - a part that, depending on the magnitude of the love, can come to approximate the whole of who we are. Joan Didion observed this disorienting fact in her classic memoir of loss: “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.” And when it does come, it unweaves the very fabric of our being. Whether what is lost are feelings or atoms, grief comes, unforgiving and unpredictable in its myriad manifestations. One need not be a dry materialist to bow before the recognition that no heart goes through life unplundered by loss - all love presupposes it, be it in death or in heartbreak. “All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched,” Seneca told his mother in his extraordinary letter on resilience in the face of loss.

Rayya elias elizabeth gilbert