Foreword
Every once in a while
someone with a gift happens to cross our path. We think we’re lucky that they
make us smile and laugh. We may even recognize how much we learn about
ourselves when they trippingly cause us to recognize our simple and very human
lacks.
Nick Owen had the chance to
experience that kind of love with another human being which brings joy with the
day and some quality of peace even to our restless, life-boggled nights. In the
company of his beloved, Nick recognized the effervescent preciousness of
reality which is…and which we all long to experience in life.
Then she was gone.
Every once in a while
someone with a gift happens to cross our path. And maybe…just maybe we
recognize an even fuller breadth of fortune, when the loss of their company
brings us to reflect in an emotional mirror which now seems forever cracked.
So much about human life is
chance. We hope to live with luck, love and passion without wanting to
recognize how much rationality love teaches and how that expansion of our
personal universe will remain forever with us even if there comes a day when
our beloved is no longer there to touch, to gaze upon, to reach out towards on
the mortal plain.
Yet, through the enduring
sense of who we have become, because we loved and were loved, we become more
solidified and assured. And because of that infinite endowment, when beauty
happens upon us we are more gratefully gratified and fully aware…of that
beauty, and of our capacity for ever-deeper yearning.
Nick Owen’s ‘Journey through
Grief’ is one man’s rumination and photographic capturing of a life which in
its ‘un-becoming’ has become something far greater than he wanted to imagine he
could see. Through poetic words, through admitting how much it hurts to lose
someone we love clearly and dearly, Nick endows each turn of nature’s branch,
each flood of air stirring a long-unnoticed parlour curtain with the awareness
of potential, chance, presence, passage and precious opportunity.
‘Journey through Grief’
isn’t a sad book - it’s an honest one. It’s a gift which in your hands is taken
into your heart for however long you carry it’s blessings with you. It’s a
reminder that our very humanity and personal vulnerabilities are often the keys
to all we seek, all we may yet know, and that we treasure most dearly.
- Boots Hart
Preface
This book id dedicated to
those who grieve, and to Gillian Allison Owen, who loved me and left me to
grieve for her.
Poetry brought us together,
and it is fitting that I begin this journey with a reference to her favourite
poet, Shelley. I have slightly adapted these lines fro Adonais to fit with a
woman’s death, rather than a man’s. Please excuse my poetic licence.
Peace, Peace! She is not dead, she doth not sleep-
She has awakened from this dream of life-
“Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife
Invulnerable things. _We decay
Like corpses in a charnel: fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our
living clay
She has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest, which men miscall delight,
Can touch her not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain
She is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented
urn.
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