grief is alive
I’ve always been a deep feeler. Ever since I was young, I spoke to trees and birds and bees. I felt the pain of tree stumps sitting idle, lifetimes of memory and vibrancy chopped away like it’s nothing. Whole ecosystems destroyed for a house to sit empty for 11 months out of the year, while a neighbor sleeps on a cold bench outside, until they are forced to move because we don’t want to be reminded that there are people with nowhere to sleep, so we outlaw sleeping in public places.
I have always been deeply affected - understandably distraught - when passing someone on the street who is asking for money or help. As a young girl, it couldn’t fathom it - how could another human be begging for help, and hundreds of people just pass by without taking a second to look, let alone help? Eventually I too, would learn to simply pass by.
I’ve always felt the pain of animals kept in cages or tanks for our viewing pleasure, never to see a pasture, never to run in a field, or feel the open flowing waters of the sea.
I feel the sickness of our fellow humans who as we speak are locked in cages. Some who may never see grass or trees again, some who may never see their children again. And if they do get out alive, to be branded as a convict; as if they weren’t far down enough, we kick them down again.
Is this really the way? Is this really the world we want to live in? Pushing the awful things so far out of our sight that maybe, just maybe, we can pretend they are not there?
As I feel into these aspects of our culture, I feel an infinite well of grief burrowed deep within me. That well is so deep that it’s easier for me to close, to “brush it under the rug,” to dismiss or to move on. And that’s how I typically exist - it’s how we all do.
But this past weekend was different. I attended a community grief ritual where we were invited to come together in all this deep feeling. We created a space for blessing our grief and deep feelings as holy - not to push them away, but to be in the mess of it all, the chaos, the numbness, the sorrow, the rage, the despair - whatever it was that was present.
It was immensely healing to be reminded that the deep grief I often feel is a perfectly sane, healthy, and natural response to the world that we live in.
We witnessed each other in sorrow - some of it from personal trauma, some for our planet, and some not from a specific source at all. We witnessed each other in rage - in fury for the way things are, and we held compassionate space as we experienced numbness - unable to access those emotions at all. We didn’t offer tissues, or tell each other to stop crying. We thanked each other. We celebrated one another for being brave enough to feel so deeply and vulnerably.
This grief ritual prioritized community - no one was left alone - and no one was bearing the burden alone. We witnessed each other with loving presence, met requests to hold hands or rub backs. And when one persons grief was too much for another to hold, we called in support. Grief is not meant to be felt alone. Not when it’s this big, or perhaps not at all.
Grief is everywhere. It lives in the soil that’s poisoned so that we can manipulate the earth’s ability to produce. Grief lives in the animals left dead on the road side, no place left for them to roam.
Grief lives in the lifetimes wasted working behind a desk, or in a cold, impersonal environment, away from our family, away from nature. Grief lives in the overwhelm of the nuclear family trying to raise children with parents who never received true emotional support themselves. Grief lives in the children forced to sit still for eight hours a day, only to be sent home with a heavy load of more “work.”
And grief lives in our transitions, in saying goodbye to friends and phases of our lives, it lives in the death of our loved ones. And grief lives in our numbed out world, where we are all pretending that everything is okay always and every day.
This way of community grieving and the ritual that I experienced was informed by the lineage of the Dagara People from Burkina Faso, brought West by Sobonfu & Malidoma Somé. Elders from the Dagara people sent Sobonfu and Malidoma west to teach westerners to grieve in the 80’s and 90’s as a strategy of survival for their people and for the wellbeing of our planet.
My teacher Ahlay Blakley states, “Sending Sobonfu and Malidoma to the west to help westerners remember how to grieve (communally) was an approach to mitigating the sickness of colonialism spreading even further and wider across the planet.” The ripples of this stagnated/ frozen grief affects us all as a people and a planet.
I don’t have a pretty bow tie to close these thoughts. I bring no answers or solutions; I’m just sitting here entrenched in it all, wondering how we can go on?
