A few months ago, a seed was planted… After holding a particularly tender EcoGathering on Grieving as part of our Composting series last autumn, the need for a collective space for processing our grief was deeply felt. Sharing our grief in community, through discussion and ritual, seemed to have filled a void for many that was greater than we could have known.
In the months that followed, we’ve witnessed loss upon loss, producing a grief that is compounded and unprocessed as the pace of modernity demands we simply move on or move over. We’ve seen the world we love ravaged by wildfires and floods, bearing witness to the loss of the homes and safety for so many living beings, both human and more-than-human. We’ve watched, wept, and wielded whatever power we could muster up against the imperialist war machine as it publicly paraded its genocides of entire bloodlines of people, bearing witness to the mass death of children, mothers, fathers, doctors, freedom fighters. We’ve been forced to accept our deepest worries as fascism rears its ugly head in a successful attempt to strip women, immigrants, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, the natural world, and countless other marginalized groups of basic rights. We bear witness to the loss of the sense of safety and security of so many.
Left without the tools, time, or community to process this great grief, each event reinforced the need for that space; each grief-stricken tear watered the seed that had been planted by grieving collectively with some of you over a Zoom call some months ago.
The seed has grown and is officially sprouting in this newsletter announcement that we will be holding additional online space to collectively hold and tend to our grief through a series of online gatherings we’ll be calling:
Good Grief.
An expression of astonishment, an exhausted response to the unbelievability of it all. “Again? Another loss? Another reason to grieve?”
But also, an acknowledgment. A welcoming of this weight we’ve neglected for so long, a reframing of a concept that has been villainized at our own expense. “Hi, you. It’s safe to come out now. We’ve got some work to do.”
As a result of the ways modernity fails to acknowledge and process death, our relationship to grief is similarly strained and misconstrued. It is too often presented as a problem that we must learn how to deal with so that it does not interfere with our abilities to be productive and efficient. It’s viewed as an obstacle we must overcome, a diagnosis to be treated, or a personal struggle to deal with in private.
But Francis Weller reminds us:
“Grief isn’t a problem to solve, it’s an encounter with soul and soul’s deep affection and love for another – whether that’s a watershed, or a tree, a beloved animal, a friend, partner, child, the earth itself. We grieve because we love, not because there’s something wrong. It goes wrong when the needs of the soul are not being provided for – community, ritual, the sacred, imagining, witnessing. That’s when we get into trouble. In our highly individualized culture we’ve been asked to carry grief all by ourselves. That’s when it becomes problematic, when it becomes overwhelming to the psyche and the soul.”
In my own apprenticeship with sorrow, a deep awareness of the fragility of life and the importance of metabolizing the inevitable sorrow it brings was instilled in me from a young age as I navigated the challenges of growing up with a sick parent, and the subsequent early death of my father. For quite some time after losing my dad, I neglected and ignored my grief in pursuit of a warped perception of “normalcy” I absorbed from my peers. But my grief waited patiently for me to come back to it, and when I was ready, it welcomed me back into a space with more warmth and comfort than any of my experiences in pursuit of “normalcy” had been able to show me. Reuniting with my grief reunited me with some of my favorite parts of myself, parts that were grown and nurtured by the love I shared with my dad and which I didn’t know how to weave into a world without him. I continue to meet my grief as it grows from the compounding loss we witness as a collective navigating a world fraught by modernity’s violence. I am passionate about reframing grief as a gift that we all have the power to harness which can free us from the numbness and disconnection modernity depends upon to continue on its exploitative, violent, genocidal tirade against life.
May Good Grief be an opportunity for reunion with the deep love we hold for a living world that is not given the time, resources, or community to be felt after loss. Through witnessing, ritual, and imagining together, may we honor grief as a sacred gift that allows us to maintain our connection to the life that came before us and all the sacred wisdom it holds. My we continue to water these seeds and collectively grow our garden of grief into a space that can provide the nourishment to carry on life and love after loss.
In a series of five individual EcoGatherings over the next few months, we will work through each of the Five Gates of Grief from Francis Weller’s work The Wild Edge of Sorrow. In addressing the grief we find at each gate, we may enter into the Communal Hall of Sorrows together, empowered by the collective wisdom held by each other and a collection of wisdom from the brave grief guides who have done the work of grieving before us. In doing so, we hope to expand our emotional capacity for collective grieving as a powerful skill for navigating uncertain futures. As the scale of loss we collectively witness expands – be it by genocide, ecocide, or an increasing ability of the state to impinge on our basic rights and liberties – so, too, must our practice of grieving.
The full schedule for all Good Grief sessions with EcoGather is below. Follow the links for more information on each session and to register to join us as we hold space for our grief in community.
📆 February 9th ⏰ 11:00am – 12:30pm ET
📆 March 4th ⏰ 7:00pm – 8:30pm ET
📆 March 27th ⏰ 6:30pm – 8:00pm ET
📆 April 19th ⏰ 2:00pm – 3:30pm ET
📆 May 6th ⏰ 7:30pm – 9:00pm ET