The Language of Longing in Collective Sorrow

Mirabai's genius was linguistic: she took the language of desire, separation, and yearning from devotional poetry and used it to say things that could not be said otherwise. She made the unspeakable speakable. In collective grief, we often lack adequate language. We reach for clichés, for platitudes, for the vocabulary of shock and tragedy provided by media. But these words are hollow. Mirabai teaches us to reach instead for the language of longing—the vocabulary of absence, of ache, of unfulfilled connection. This is the language poets have always used. It names the paradoxical truth that we grieve most intensely for what we desire, what we wished could continue, what we loved even from a distance. When a public figure dies, we might ask: What was I longing for in them? What did they represent that I still desire? How do I speak the language of that longing now that they are gone? By using the language of desire and devotion rather than clinical descriptions of loss, we honor grief's true nature: it is love with nowhere to go, and giving it poetic voice is a form of alchemy.