Grief Snippets

The Wild Edge of Sorrow - Francis Weller

We register in our psyche, consciously or not, the fact of our shared sorrow.

Loss bind us together in a potent alchemy, confirming the heart's intimacy with all things.

Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning.

No loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.

Grief is not a problem to be solved, not a condition to be medicated, but a deep encounter with an essential experience of being human, an experience that needs to be witnessed.

Sorrow is a sustained note in the song of being alive.

We have sadly turned the ritual of life into the routine of existence.

the dream of full-throated living

Sorrow carves riverbeds in our soul, deepening us as it flows in and out of our lives.

"When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us." - John O'Donohue

this difficult, holy visitor

grief as vital and necessary, not as something only to be endured

Complexes are fragmentary bundles of concentred emotional energy formed when we were confronted with an experience to intense for us to successfully digest. What had been severed for the sake of our preservation must now be rejoined for the sake of our healing.

Attunement is a particular quality of attention, woven with affection, offered by someone we love and trust. This deep attention is what enables us to make painful experiences tolerable.

We live in a sacramental cosmos and life feeds on life. The appropriate response is a ripened melancholy combined with ritual gratitude.

"In your patience, is your soul." - James Hillman

Grief is subversive, undermining our society's quiet agreement that we behave and be in control of our emotions.

Through our ability to acknowledge the layers of loss, we can truly discover our capacity to respond, to protect, and to restore what has been damaged.

"Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground." - Oscar Wilde

@I have no time to feel into a good book of poetry. Such softness for no good reason.

Do I approach my mother with reverence? My aunt and uncle? My children? My colleagues?

This is the first sign of my heart telling me, stop, you've read enough. Break away.

Have I truly given a year to grieve? I'm charging through things quickly.

To and From the Soul's Hall

Longitudinal study of the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, Italian American mining community

digesting and metabolizing the bitter tincture of loss

Without an adequate time in the ashes tending the loss, sorrow mutates into symptoms of depression, anxiety, dullness and despair.

"To witness mindfully is to grieve for what has been lost." - Freeman House

non-redemptive mourning acknowledges that some losses should never be allowed to settle, like silt, to the bottom of our memory, to "keep the past from slipping away in a present that continues to deny it" - Mary Watkins, Helene Shulman

"If sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time." - Stephen Levine

The Five Gates

Everything is a gift, and nothing lasts.

Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives.

"Everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me." - Carl Jung

The Indo-European root of the word 'cure', means to sorrow for something. - Kat Duff

We dare not show these outcast brothers and sisters to anyone, and thereby deny these parts of ourselves the healing salve of community.

When events reach their saturation point, the fictions crystallize into things that feel like truth.

• From feeling worthless to seeing ourselves as wounded.
• From seeing ourselves through a lens to contempt to one of a budding compassion
• From silence to sharing

What is the vow your soul is waiting for you to make? What will you have to sacrifice in order to honor that vow? For what would your soul like to be remembered? Write your obituary.

@To love fiercely, with abandon. @To be unloved.

Surely if I mattered, if I was good enough, this need, this pain would have received attention and holding by someone.

Finding a target for blame is effortless. Nothing is asked of us when we simply assign fault to someone else.

We expected forty pairs of eyes greeting us in the morning, and all we got was one or two pairs looking back at us. We needed the full range of masculine and feminine expressions to surround us and grant us a knowledge of how these potencies move in the world.

Hold these regrets with gentleness, acknowledging who were at the time we made those choices, instead of chewing these bones over and over in the vain hope that some new perspectives might arise, freeing us from the sorrow attached to our actions.

Protest shuttle: I will not live small.

Anima mundi: soul of the world

"The grief and sense of loss, that we often interpret as a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered." - Paul Shepard

We are born as Stone Age children, embedded in the primal matrix of life and knew the world and ourselves only through this perception.

nature deficit disorder - Richard Louv

We were welcome in any home and could find sustenance at any fire.

They knew their worth and their welcome. There wasn't any anxiety of whether someone was good enough to be let inside the circle; this was a given.

She carries a scar, but her soul is intact. Her village immediately let her know what happened had nothing to do with her, and that she was loved and cherished by the people.

Deep in our bones lies an intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community.

Spiritual employment - simply being who we are confirms our place in the village.

What is the gift you carry in your soul? What have you brought with you into the heart of the village?

We long to feel that we are needed to keep the whole wild, spinning world happening.

Clarke Berry placed his hand on a large rock lying on a table, and said, "This is my clock. I operate at geologic speed. And if you're going to work with the soul, you need to learn this rhythm, because this is how the soul moves."

@My mind yearns for the wild dance. Wanting to join a monastery just to be called "brother". This longing to be folded in. I want to fold my mother in. Doesn't make sense now to cut off from her. Been there, done that.

Rituals of Renewal

At least four times a month, they gather to care for the needs of the people. Those who risk contacting the Num don't do so on their own behalf, but for the sake of the community as a whole.

Rituals is a means of attuning ourselves with one another, to the land, and to the invisible worlds of spirit.

Grief has never been private; it has always been communal. 

Ritual relies not so much on speech as on gestures, rhythms, movements, and emotion.

• breaks us open to a vast and more enchanted world
• we're aided in ritual space to remember what we really need to live in community with other humans and the natural world
• invite the shadow to show up

Ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purposes of healing and transformation.

comforting touch, washing of hands and feet, and ample holding

smudging with sage to clear the psychic space, brushing with rosemary branches to cleanse the energy field, and anointing with ash for protection.

In two weeks we would hold a grief ritual. It couldn't happen earlier, because we needed to prepare the class for the deep work of grieving together. In the meantime, I encouraged her to tell her classmates.

The first week we shared stories. The following we set up a shrine to receive the grief; we said an invocation and entered the intense field of decades-old sorrow.

Some objects that represented his marriage that he would be willing to burn, in a small coffin made by some of the men in the community

The Days of Sorrow: the fateful days of his wife's illness, announcement, etc.

The Days of Joy: the day they got married, had birth, etc.

Statement of commitment to share

Two fires and a threshold in between

Shattered an object that represented the old agreements

Derangement is necessary because our current emotional 'arrangement' is not working.

The main thing is that we begin to take risks, that we contribute something to the moment thta can potentially offer healing.

The House of Aloneness

premature revelation - we are addicted to disclosure

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every minute holy. Love "consists of two solitudes which border, protect, and greet each other." - Rilke

We cannot use information or concepts to somehow reduce our experience of pain. We must turn toward our experience and touch it with the softest hands possible.

insight, endurance, erupt into action. Psychology can only be helpful with the stage of insight.

Obstacles

It's possible I'm pushing through solid rock

in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;

I'm such a long way in I see no way through,

and no space: everything is close to my face,

and everything close to my face is stone.

I don't have much knowledge yet in grief -

so this massive darkness makes me small.

You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:

then your great transforming will happen to me,

and my great grief cry will happen to you.

Give emotions a bottom, a foundation upon which to come to rest.

@I feel airy, like a small bird, a small brook, pretending to be the deep and vast ocean, while in reality the amount of salt I can hold is only a palmful.

@how long have I avoided feeling the electricity of attraction?

Drinking the tears of the world

Write for ten minutes about what they would need to let go of in order to fully stand in the world as adults who belonged to the community and who had faith in life.

Complex

We cannot heal what we cannot separate from.

At the heart of every complex is a jewel of great price.

Austin Center for Grief and Loss - Evening of Remembrance

Acknowledgment & Lighting the Candles

Poem: On the Death of a Beloved

Song: Amelia

Each participant lights candle: 

Type in name of loved ones, read aloud: 

Everyone says their loved ones's names together, and hold up their photos.

Everyone says "Your light still shines among us."

Another song: Amelia

2 person alternates reading a poem: 

Goodbye

Flip book: https://www.flipsnack.com/amvaladez/evening-of-remembrance-2021-program.html

Share about your loss

Share about the person you love

Complicated grief

Mark Nepo's poem

ADRIFT by Mark Nepo

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.

This is how the heart makes a duet of

wonder and grief. The light spraying through the lace 

of the fern is as delicate as the fibres of memory forming 

their web around the knot in my throat. The breeze makes 

the birds move from branch to branch as the ache makes me

look for those i've lost in the next room, in the next song, 

in the laugh of the next stranger. In the very center, under it all, what we have that no one can take away and all we've lost 

face each other. It is there that i'm adrift, feeling punctured 

by the holiness that exists inside everything. 

I am so sad and everything is beautiful. 

On the Ridge

"We can grow by simply lis-

tening, the way the tree on

that ridge listens its branches

to the sky, the way blood

listens its flow to the site

of a wound, the way you

listen like a basin when

my head so full of grief

can't look you in the eye.

We can listen our way out

of howling, the way the heart

can soften the wolf we keep

inside. We can last by listen-

ing deeply, the way roots

listen for the next inch of

earth, the way the old turtle

listens all he hears into the

pattern of his shell.

What's the legacy of your loss, your loved one?

Evening Prayer: Sleep chant

https://open.spotify.com/track/6VhHJCL7egEI5QpjfmFat2