Grief and Love
Wisdom for carrying grief in modern times
“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning.”
Francis Weller
In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller names his second gate of grief: The places that have not known love. He writes:
“There is another entrance to grief, a second gateway, different from the gate connected to losing someone or something that we love. This grief occurs in the places often untouched by love. These are profoundly tender places precisely because they have lived outside of kindness, compassion, warmth, or welcome. These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our lives. We often hate these parts of ourselves, hold them in contempt, and refuse to allow them the light of day. We do not show these outcast brothers and sisters to anyone, and we thereby deny these parts of ourselves the healing salve of community.”
“Gershon Kaufman, one of the most important writers on shame, has said that shame leaves us feeling ‘unspeakably and irreparably defective.’ It is unspeakable because we do not want anyone to know how we feel inside. We fear it is irreparable because we think it is not something we have done wrong—it is simply who we are. We cannot remove the stain from our core. We search and search for the defect, hoping that, once found, it can be exorcised like some grotesque demon. But it lingers, remaining there our entire lives, anxious that it will be seen and simultaneously longing to be seen and touched with compassion.”
“No one arrives on this earth encrusted with shame. Rather, shame settles in our bones over time, accumulating during times of neglect or violation. Every one of us has encountered times when the connection between us and the one we needed for attention and love was ruptured.”
Francis states further that grief will be the keynote for the foreseeable future, calling the days that lie ahead “the long dark.”
How do we contain the amount of grief coming at and through us during these difficult times? Two things come to mind: titration and community. Without the container of community we are left with no spaces in which to hold and process our deep stores of sorrow. Inevitably our bodies become storehouses for pain simply for lack of a safe space to contain and process.
We cannot move into the deep ground of our grief alone. Outside of the context of a living village—in which pain would be considered not personal but communal—there are ways we can begin to digest and compost this grief of our soul’s longing to be seen, heard and held in our fullness.
One of the practices is titration, meaning, we move into the grief—by setting a timer to journal or process with a friend, for example—and then move back out of it. If you think back over your relationship to powerful emotions you carry, you might find that this is something you do naturally.
The old adage comes to mind: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
We can touch into our sorrow for a moment, and when the timer goes off, close the journal, turn off the sad playlist, and then continue on to have a day. Long gone are the days when the bereaved person would wear black or “live in the ashes,” as Francis Weller puts it, for a year, signaling to all those around them that their primary work is mourning. And further, that they now require more from the village than they can give.
Another way to hold grief is by creating what Francis Weller calls a “sudden village.” In the absence of an intact village—for which our ancient nervous systems are deeply wired—we can come together with others around a shared intention within a safe, communal space to unpack our sorrow and sadness.
Together we touch into the deeper ground of grief, hold and witness one another, and then close the circle, say our goodbyes and carry on once more with our modern lives. Our souls fed from the “primary satisfaction” of sharing and listening deeply from the heart. With every experience of a sudden village we emerge changed, somehow more ourselves. We meet the world with new eyes, hopefully a bit lighter and our soul fires burning brighter.
I’ve done enough of my own work to know this is the work I am meant to do in the world. To be one who can hold and create a container for sorrow and soul.
When we learn to belong to the stories that shaped us, we find belonging everywhere we go. Moreover, we become houses of belonging for other souls who have yet to find their way home.
Skeleton Woman
The story of Skeleton Woman begins with her father throwing her from a cliff. She sinks to the bottom of the sea never to be seen again. Until, that is, a fisherman from another land comes along.
Though we are never told what it is she did to deserve such a fate, the implication is that there was something that her father deemed so unacceptable that she was discarded and left for dead. (Oh hello, patriarchy and your egregious degradation of the feminine principle—we see you!)
What woman does not know what it is to carve and whittle herself down, casting off vestiges of self and soul in order to find acceptance and belonging in the world today?
This is the story of Skeleton Woman, which beautifully illustrates the process of soul retrieval and redemption for the places within us that have not known love.
Working with mythos is incredibly potent as all myths are prescriptive and proscriptive. When we think mythologically and locate ourselves in a timeless tale we can follow the clues and, overlaying our own life story, transpose the myth’s lysis, or resolution, in real time. In doing so, we gain profound clarity on what our next steps are out of dire straits or off the seabed floor.
This work is divinatory. Like other esoteric practices we can use a timeless tale as a divining rod to tell us where it is we are meant to go.
On Friday night, October 4th, we will gather around the fire of the beautiful, instructive tale of Skeleton Woman. We will begin with a meditation to connect into our bodies, then I will read the story and we will break it down piece by piece.
Like the fisherman in the tale, we will utilize a writing prompt to summon a significant story from our our own lives out from the depths. We will spend the evening warming these personal tales with the fires of creativity and compassion, with plenty of time for discussion and sharing.
Together we will sing over the bones to make meaning, magic and medicine, not only for ourselves but for the world around us.
“In the book Swamplands of the Soul I suggested that our periodic visitation to dismal places such as depression, loss, betrayal, grief, and so on—from which none of us is exempt—will be experienced sooner or later in life. But to move beyond a posture of outrage at life’s betrayal, we are called to ask another question: To what present task is this swampland calling me? Asking this question moves us from a posture of victimhood to engagement with the unfolding of our destiny. Without this move, fate triumphs over destiny.”
James Hollis
You will leave our time together with a felt sense of connection to yourself and others, empowered with insight and clarity for taking aligned action along your journey to becoming a more authentic version of who you are.
“We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exemplar for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.”
James Hollis
It’s time to welcome all parts of you into the house of belonging.
This is the singular intention I hold at every gathering of Wildish.
I hope you’ll join me in just two weeks for the next Wildish Weekend Workshop: A Carnival of Connection for a Collective of Creative Archivists and Ragtag Storytellers