This is the story of survival. Of learning again how to breathe, to trust the stability of your bones to support your standing up to walk out the door into another day. Maya and the Gordian Knot speaks to the courage of the simple acts, the unreguarded heroism of being, This is the frank conversation between a man and a woman newly met in grief; the testament to their efforts to articulate the strange, unboundaried world of death. The format of the book honors their separate voices, mining the difference that gender and type of loss might offer. It is also an investigation of desperate madness--a hard look at the bewilderingly unstable geography of grief. At the conclusion of the book the authors own up more fully to their shared world as professional musicians. They look closely at how music both creates and shapes us, circumscribing our lives as the unnoticed medicine of body, mind and heart. We all die. People and creatures we love dearly, die. We are breathed in and out of life in a predictable rhythm--and yet knowing that doesn't seem to mitigate the pain of loss. Our response to one another in the moments when time collapses, when reliability has suddenly and utterly vanished, makes us who we are as a community. We need to be able to talk about death, to talk about the nature of grieving and to abide with those among us who are lost in roaring uncertainty--we need to hold the filaments of dailyness about them until the ground reemerges under their feet again. And we need to talk about how to do that well--because if we have loved, it's a descent we all face. Maya and the Gordian Knot slips us inside grief's skin in hopes that we may become better friends to one another when we face the worst.
