Mirabai Starr - We Cannot Endure This Alone

You know, not everybody that's in the grief space is also in the death and dying space and vice versa.

You know, people who sit with the dying don't always end up hanging out with people on the other side of that, which is the grief side.

And for me, they've always been very much intertwined.

So I love doing this with this conversation with you because you are also inhabiting both of those spaces in a really fluid way.

I mean, Taos, where I live in New Mexico, is a really small town and small community.

And so somehow when I started doing grief work about 20 years ago here in our community, which I do as Seva or service.

That's the Sanskrit term.

I want all the translations like dropping.

I know you got like, we'll talk about translating too, but just to say like, give me all the language.

Yeah.

So Seva in Sanskrit is, it's a service, you know? So I, that's something I do for my community.

Um, it doesn't even come up as a conversation.

Like it's not my profession.

I, I, um,

I offer

bereavement guidance, I guess.

But I mean, I am a certified grief counselor, but that's not it.

It's about just being able to sit with people as I craved for people to be able to sit with me.

But also that ended up...

I started getting invitations to sit at the bedside of people I knew or people who knew people who knew me kind of close associations, even if I didn't know them directly.

And so I do both of those a lot in in my little town is sit with the dying and and sit with the grieving and officiate memorial services and.

So I am so grateful that I don't have to pick one or the other of these, I don't know, communities to be with.

You said something earlier when we were talking just now about how you...

It's something like you can't believe you get to do this, like to talk with people.

It is such an honor.