The delicacy of grief

In some way, shape or form, grief makes its grand entrance into our lives, with half an intent to greatly overstay its welcome. And hence the formidable variety of ways to explicate its arrival...we say the old gentleman has befallen, like raindrops from the sky; has streamed down the landscape of our being, like an endlessly meandering river; has invaded and pervaded our core like a draconian physician, a barbaric warrior. When thus impelled, when thus passivized into the role of an unwilling recipient, we become subordinate to the most fragile of human weaknesses, the intangibly powerful instinct of sorrow. What naked and laughable irony, amidst rhetoric of mastery over our destiny! Even a child can press clay better, though its expression may be just as forlorn. Either we recant every noble salutation unto ourselves, reverse the wheels of progress and evolution, or we reinvoke that most fundamental drive of humanity, that spark of ravenous hunger that first lunged a spear into some hapless beast. We revisit every cauldron, every melting pot, every jar of clay, every receptacle of nutrition....and concoct the delicacy of grief, the feast of reprieve.