Grief, for essential living
Grief is vital, it is full of life.
Grief is vital.
Vital, as in essential, yes, but also vital as in vibrant and full of life.
Grief is full of life. (and life is full of grief, but more on that later.) When we are close to our grief, we are close to our heart stuff.
We have come here to risk our hearts, and the world will break you, there is no doubt about that. The grace is in how we allow ourselves to be broken open, to open to that which can truly matter to us. How much of the world can we allow in?
The poet David Whyte says that you will break your own heart too, and rightly so. You will do so by allowing life in. If we allow ourselves to be truly moved by life, it will reach the space within where our care is so great and tender that we could ache with the beating of it.
The beauty of the natural world brings my heart to its knees, and regularly. The living world becomes an altar that my love waters with tears. The transience of our human experience determines that we will lose that which we love, whether by a long and well-lived life, by accident or mishap, or due to our own awkward handling of that which is most precious. The latter is a particularly piercing flavour of grief, in that, often, we do not know how to be close to that which is vital. A lot like grief itself.
Relationship is the landscape that grief shapes. How close can we move toward love? What keeps us apart, removed, estranged? Let us not forget that we are in relationship with everything. Life itself is relationship.
Grief is the distance between us and everything else.
Grief is also the closest part of ourselves. We cannot live without grief just as we cannot love without grief. To deny its ever-present reality is to shard off a fragment of existence and inhabit a half spun world.
Francis Weller says that grief and gratitude are eternal sisters. Some griefs are too brutal, too gut wrenching, simply too great to reach gratitude in these lifetimes. Gratitude is generative, and this is a core branch of that sisterhood. Grief too, is generative — when acknowledged, met and allowed to flow, grief’s potency carries yet more life through our bones.
To make a competency of grief is to make a competency of living.
The dance of life will spin us through the realms of yearning, of loss, of incapacity, of that-which-could-be-and-never-will-be many times over. To deny this is to live a half life. Each one of us will be asked to walk the landscape of grief; some gentle paths, some impossible mountains.
Know that you are not the only walker.
To make a competency of grief is to make a competency of living. A competency of fiercely vulnerable bravery with the truth of life. A bravery that originates in love and flows through many places to arrive back at its tender origins. Life is like that — a cycle, or a meandering spiraling flow — but never a straight line. So too are the stages of Big Griefs moved through in cycles. Just as love is messy and ineffable, do not expect grief to tidily organise itself along a linear predefined process.
For other griefs, the seemingly little ones, the ones that whisper through our days, the ones we could well ignore for quite some time, until one day they fell the very ground beneath us, because- lo and behold- when unanswered and ignored, our grief grows mighty and eventually takes up all space! There are many such griefs that visit our days. Well, for those griefs, invite them in.
Invite them in. Knowing that, just as we may wish to move toward love, our grief wants to move toward and through us. Just as we may live love imperfectly, so too will we handle grief. Expect that. Just as love is not a solo venture, neither is grief. Just as all of life is relationship in motion, we will learn by practice, but particularly by sharing with each other.
Sharing in our grief is a vital capacity indeed.
What breaks your heart about the world you live in? There are so very many pains and struggles present in all of our experiences. We stand (or stoop) at a moment in time when everything seems at risk. To be with our pains and our struggles can enable us to be with the beyond. That which we deny only grows stronger.
Sharing in our personal lands us in the collective, the universal.
A grief circle or ceremony is a dedicated space for sharing, witnessing and acknowledging any grief that wants or needs to arise in that space. When we do this, something special happens. If you have ever attended a grief circle you will perhaps know just how connective, how relieving, how transformative it is to share in our griefs. To know that we are all pierced by the grief of life, and that we are shaped and molded ever wider by it.
What is so striking, so seemingly special, is our capacity to be with the grief — to witness it for each other, to collectively hold that space, to hold the weight of it, and then, to let it flow through. We have a huge capacity for this, that seemingly very few of us were ever really taught. We know how to do this. In a dedicated space, given a few pointers around etiquette and conduct, we have an innate capacity to deal with our grief.
It can be the same in our lives. When acknowledged, allowed, and shared, this capacity rises from the depths of us to know that this too needs to flow.
It is so deeply human. In that sense, it is both miraculously special and utterly ordinary. It is simply vital.
Grief is vital, it is full of life.