An apprenticeship with grief
Resources to welcome a relationship with sorrow
I, like many of us have had a complicated relationship with grief and grieving. At a very young 21, I lost my mum to cancer and the narrative I picked up at the time was that I could be sad for a while but after a certain point I wasn’t supposed to talk about it (not again).
People didn’t want to hear about how I still felt like the air had been sucked out of me a year later. They wanted me to be ok, because that was easier. So I adapted. I learned to keep my sadness under wraps, disappear into hedonsim and instead build some pretty powerful walls around my tender young heart.
When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms - Francis Weller
We’re a society that doesn’t do well with death. We’re far away from the rituals of grief that might have punctuated the lives of our ancestors. When loss arises it can feel like an unwelcome guest, an intrusion into our already too full lives.
The landscape of sorrow is unfamiliar leaving us confused and lost when grief comes near. Our grief pulls us down (grief from the latin word ‘gravare’ meaning heavy) which is at odds with a culture obsessed with rising up and keeping going.
But I don’t see how we can outrun it for much longer. As we watch the structures and symbols of our society crumble we are all being faced with not only our personal experiences of loss but also the wider grief of dying coral reefs, melting ice caps, the silencing of languages, the extermination of entire human populations.
So if we can’t avoid it, how do we reclaim our connection to grief and relearn how to be in relationship with it?
As the quotes I’ve shared so far might suggest, I’ve fallen deeply in love with the work of Francis Weller, author of The Wild edge of Sorrow (the quotes shared are from his book) who encourages the reclamation of grief work to be the necessary balm for the times we are in.
When we can find the capacity to be alongside our broken open hearts we begin to feel again (as opposed to numbing or avoiding feeling). Our wide open hearts can transmute our personal and collective grief into something generative.
Grief work offers us a trail leading back to the vitality that is our birthright. When we fully honour our many losses, our lives become more fully able to embody the wild joy that aches to leap from our hearts into the shimmering world - Francis Weller
Our grief, is not something to "get over" - it's something to tend to, to be in relationship with. We can allow it to shape us, to call us back to a life of connection and intimacy with ourselves, each other and the wider ecosystem. It’s an invitation to feed the fires of our aliveness not dampen them.
When we allow ourselves to feel the full weight of our losses, we also open to the fullness of love, beauty, and presence.
On my own ‘apprenticeship with grief’ I’ve discovered some resources that have helped me continue to dismantle the walls I built around my grief and instead begin to hold it with reverence.
They’ve offered me language when I had none, ritual when I felt lost, and community when I felt alone. I wanted to share some of them with you here, perhaps to hold close as you walk this winding path.
May they meet you where you are, and offer you some sense of companionship as you deepen your own relationship with grief.
This recent podcast with Francis and Nate Hagens is beautiful and fortifying and a great introduction to the work of Francis and grief as ritual
This entire album by Alexandra Blakely which has been repetitively played over the last month
This poem by Alison Luterman which spoke to my tender heart
And this poem by Jaiya John on the theads of ancestral connection (we are not doing this work alone)
Other things you might be interested in:
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PS: If you enjoyed this post you might want to read my last post on finding steadiness in challenging times ⬇️
The other side of challenge?
When life offers us challenges naturally we want to get to the other side quickly, restore normal life and continue as usual. But what if that isn’t possible? What if the stressor continues, beyond our control and we can’t see an end to the stormy seas in front of us? (like being in the midst of a poly-crisis)