What My Seven Year Old Taught Me About Grief, Grace, and Holding Two Truths at Once

A letter from Mayra Penaloza on the week our son's teacher passed away, what a seven year old taught her about wisdom, and what Gemini Season is asking all of us to hold.

Sat Nam Loves, Myrah here.

The monsoon lifted in Bali this week.

You feel it in the body before you understand it in the mind. The air goes lighter. The light goes longer. By midday the sun is so generous it asks for complete surrender, and you give it. You lie down. You let the fan move the hot air around the room while the island goes white and silent. The nap is not laziness here. It is devotion.

The evenings give everything back. You walk toward the ocean as the air cools and the sky changes color, and the Balinese are at their shrines, lighting their offerings, praying the way the rest of the world makes coffee. The sacred is not separate here. It is woven through every doorway, every meal, every transition of the day.

This is the Bali we moved here for. And this week, of all weeks, I needed it.

The Week That Asked Everything

Our son's teacher passed away on Wednesday.

He is seven years old, our boy. And I spent three days trying to find the right words. For him. For the other parents who could not find their footing. For the families in our community who needed someone to hold steady while they processed their own grief.

I was holding all of it. The conversations. The not-knowing. The looking back at my own life through the lens of how fragile and brief and absolutely worth honoring it all is.

And then at the end of one of those days, I sat with my son. I asked him how he was feeling. I asked him what he might say to his friends when they all heard the news.

He looked at me.

I understand mamma. I will be ok.

Seven years old.

Comforting me.

With more steadiness than I had managed all day.

The Sentence I Have Been Sitting Inside

I have been sitting inside that sentence ever since.

It is not a denial of what happened. It is not a child bypassing his grief to make his mother feel better. It is something more sophisticated. It is the willingness to hold the hard thing fully, and to trust himself to continue.

That is wisdom. And a seven year old offered it to me freely, in the middle of his own loss, without anyone asking him for it.

I have been thinking about how often we, as adults, refuse this exact kind of integration. We believe we have to feel only one thing at a time. To be either sad or hopeful. Either grieving or grateful. Either undone or okay. As if the human heart had only one channel and we had to choose which one to play.

My son did not choose. He held both.

The loss of his teacher was real. His grief was real. And his trust in his own ability to be ok was also real. He did not have to dismiss the first to access the second. He simply let them coexist.

What Gemini Season Is Holding

This is what Gemini Season is holding right now. The duality. The twins. Two truths existing at once, neither canceling the other out.

The grief and the beauty. The loss and the love. The heaviness of what life can ask of us and the extraordinary sweetness of who we get to be in response to it.

The New Moon in Gemini on June 4 will be one of the most powerful new moons in air energy this year. It is asking us to expand our capacity. To stop choosing between feelings. To learn to hold what is true, even when what is true is more than one thing at the same time.

The Balinese understand this in their bones. It is woven into the architecture of their days. Every offering, every prayer, every small act of honoring is a practice of showing up for life before life asks you to. The doorways here are lined with frangipani petals every morning. The shrines burn with incense every evening. The sacred is not summoned on special occasions. It is the constant, quiet practice of presence.

This week, my son taught me the same thing.

Be Intense With Your Love

If there is someone you have been meaning to reach out to this week, please be the one who goes first. Don't wait for the right moment. There is no right moment. There is only this one.

Be intense with your love while you have it to give.

You never know what someone is carrying. You never know what your presence is doing for them. The text you send today might land in a week that is asking everything of someone you love. The call you make this afternoon might be the one moment of light in someone's day that you will never know about.

Show up. Stay a little longer. Ask the second question. Be the one who holds it.

He is going to be ok. So are you. So am I.

Not because the hard things don't happen. Because we are here, together, fully present, intense with our love.

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With love from Bali,
Myrah