I’ve been reading a lot of Rumi lately, looking for something to make sense of this. He wrote about separation and divine union 800 years ago and it feels weirdly specific to what I’m going through. The Sufis saw it as a mystical reunion with the divine through another soul. St. John of the Cross had similar ideas about union with God through the dark night.
I wonder if our ancestors understood the pain of separation differently than we do now.