Can I get a Witness?

How do we bear witness to so much grief?

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In an on-line grief group I’ve been a part off for the past year and a half or so, early on we did a journaling exercise where we drew out our grief in a circle map, labeling each circle with personal grief, culture grief, world grief, ancestral grief, and so forth. (All of which sounds very similar to the 5 Gates of Grief that Francis Weller talks about).

Here’s a very incomplete example I mocked up in Canva:

Try making one of these for yourself. What griefs are you carrying that by naming and writing down might loosen up some space? Feel free to change the order of the circles too and add more rings. Your ring of griefs can be made as macro or micro as you like. Maybe your personal grief is the biggest outer ring, maybe your ancestral grief is. Maybe you want to make a whole ring of grief about raising children, birth work in a time of rising surgical birth/interventions and living in a country with one of the highest maternal mortality rates of any so-called “modern” nation. Maybe you want to make a ring of griefs just about public education, the history of it, the school to prison pipeline, the rise of technocratic education and the slow erasure in most schools around this country of practical things like carpentry, gardening, sewing, canning, cooking, animal husbandry, and auto-body shop.

My world grief still often feels like the biggest to me.

I get into my car and think about the earth disruption that goes into the car. What exactly it takes to make a goddamn car tire! How so much violence has been committed in places like Iraq and Iran so we can have oil so we can drive cars. In case you don’t know this about me I enjoy driving but I actually fucking hate car culture, and would love to live to see a day where we go back to localized living and horse and buggy. I am not a proponent of any greenwashed green revolution being proposed by anyone that has more fossil fuels plumbed from the ground to power solar cells etc. No I want a return to a world made by hand. In the meantime I gnash my teeth and tear my hair over how it is impossible to live my values, so I’ll just plunk away here on my fossil fueled violent laden fancy MacBook computer to all of you reading out there.

Regularly I think about how mind blowing it is that everything around me came from this planet, and yet things can be refined and processed and changed to such extent that poisons us and every creature around us.

I turn on the faucet and think about the plastic piping through which the water travels through from deep beneath the ground, and then into my home. I think about an image I saw as a young woman reading National Geographic of women in parts of sub-saharan Africa where they walk miles and miles just for a couple gallons of fresh water, sometimes carrying that water in plastic baggies.

I drive down my road and pass the row upon row upon row of neatly bundled Raspberry canes, the familiar sight of brown skinned laborers, who show up en masse at various times of the season- in spring to prune and fertilize, in summer to harvest, in fall to trellis and trim and clean up, and then for most of the time, the rows are empty and quiet. The farm workers almost stealth like in their operations. Blink and you miss them.

But without the internet, print journalism, and social media in general, how would my world grief look and feel?

Would I necessarily feel grief for the Raspberry fields if I didn’t know the often horrific working conditions of the farm workers who tend those fields the lack of good housing or paid benefits and union support? If didn’t know a thing or two about mono-culture agriculture and its impacts on soil fertility and the greater ecological web in which Raspberry field, exists would it pain me as much as it does to see those rows with the raw bare earth underneath and the poison trucks with the fat back pack tanks and the spray wand going up and down the rows? If I hadn’t studied Spanish for years in middle school and high school, would I still be able to read the sign that says “Peligro Pesticidas!” How many people who live on this road drive past those Raspberry fields and see something completely? Hard work. Excitement for the coming bounty of Raspberry season. Resentment for the farm workers “taking jobs.” Or as I suspect, they simply drive past, not noticing much of anything, not ever seeing what’s right in front of them.

Austin Valley/CC BY 2.0

What kind of capacity for grief do we need to be building right now?

If we are not grieving for what’s right in front of us, what happens to those atrocities? Why does it seem to me that witnessing and being witnessed changes how grief moves through us in/and around the world? Do our personal practices and displays of grief have any bearing on the collective?

I believe that they do in both practical and psychic/spiritual ways- my empathy and grief for the suffering I witness keeps me engaged with collective struggle, keeps me engaged as a citizen who takes time regularly to sign petitions, email/call my legislators, donate money to local groups and individuals doing good work in the world and stand up to injustices as best I can when I witness them in real time. My ability to grieve and cry regularly frees up space in my psyche and spirit which allows heart to stay open. Yes, I hurt like a hell a lot of the time, but if I didn’t hurt, how would that transfer to my children, to others around me? As the study of Epigenetics becomes more recognized in the ways that say, nutritional deficiencies and stress can be passed from generation to generation, can we finally agree and acknowledge that unwept tears and rage can be passed on?

What kind of grief practices do we need for the kind of global grief we now have the ability to bear witness too- the gutting despair and horror we feel when we read and see footage of human bodies falling off airplanes as the planes make their noisy take off into the air while hundreds of people crowds the tarmac looking for escape from Taliban rule?

What kind of rituals are we supposed to practice for the grief we feel when we read about the great pacific garbage patch?

How would our work life policies change to accommodate our personal and world grief? On a recent Instagram post on a gun control activist page, one commenter suggested that anyone affected by a recent school shooting take bereavement leave. And aren’t we all being affected? At this time there is an estimated 352 million guns in current circulation in the United States- more guns than people. So isn’t it only a matter of time?

However, if I don’t read the news I would rarely know what was going on in the world. I’m mostly a stay at home Mother these days. We live out on 10 acres where I don’t speak to my neighbors beyond a casual “Hello.” When I delete Instagram from my phone I am no longer booping through images and stories of stories about missing and murdered indigenous women, the declining health of our resident Orca whale population, the recent story of Mila Jackson, born at home after her black mother endured traumatic surgical birth, welcomed by her father, mother, two older brothers, with the help of a local black midwife, only to have their pediatrician of ten years file a complaint with CPS over what is a normal condition of birth called physiologic jaundice- perhaps his own anti-black bias and fear/hatred of midwifery centered care, resulting in this newborn baby stolen from her family, and as of this writing, she is still not reunited with her family.

It’s just too fucking much ain’t it sometimes?

“Why don’t you just stop paying attention?”

“Well there’s nothing you or I can do about it…”

“You just can’t get so worked up over it!”

“Why do you care so much?”

Have you heard any of these or other variations? Drop a comment below and share about it. I’ve been hearing these for years from many different angles, and it took me years and years to get to the place where I am now, and know that I’m not alone. I feel proud now of my capacity and willingness to think and feel deeply. But it does hurt me when people refuse to bear witness to that or at the very least just nod and say “I know how it is.” Which is one of the reasons I appreciate the online portal of Instagram and also some of the writes here on Substack - where I’m witnessing creators pushing up against racism, celebrating trans love and parenthood, rallying behind black midwives and doulas to help crowdfund for their birth centers like the Jamaa Birth Village in Ferguson, Missouri to herbalists sharing all sorts of free education to make home remedies. There are fellow grievers, fledgling animists, disability activists, anti-diet writers, parent meme makers, polyamorous folks, and the wellness/new age/cult critics, who inspire me, evolve my thinking and make me laugh, rage and grieve, and remind me I am not alone. Truly, that is the wonder of the democratizing impact of the world wide web.

But when I delete that app off my phone for months at a time like I do, when I don’t read any news outlets, watch news, or even read the local paper online, how do I get my news? How does my grief load change?

I get the news I need on the weather report
Oh, I can gather all the news I need on the weather report

-The Only Living Boy in New York
by Paul Simon

Does my local grief make me more able to bear the world’s grief? Or vice versa? Does the world’s grief help keep us insulated by allowing us to say, “well at least it’s not that bad here” or “that could never happen here, This is America!” Yes, yes, This is America- cue Childish Gambino. How can so many people believe that what happens there or there or there can never happen here or here or here, when our macro and micro grief and rage are inextricably woven?

Why are some people more able to grieve than others?

Is it something some of us were born with? This capacity to feel every little thing. To notice small things that it seems like most people just are too busy to see.

So yes, when I sign off from social media, when I hit delete on emails as soon as I see them without bothering to open them, when I don’t read the news or watch the news, I take my news from the weather report. And the weather tells me a great deal…anyone who’s grown food or raised animals knows the weather is everything. Reckoning always with a multitude of powerful beings: Gods of Wind, Sun, Rain, Drought, Soil, Compost, Flood and Blight. Gods of Aphids and Wireworms and Cabbage Moth, Mouse, Vole and Mole, Possum, Minx, Rabbit, and Coyote. Just to name a few…

Digging a carrot patch you’ve been tending for months to pull one lush bright orange carrot from loamy soil to see the familiar black roads grooved all over, the tiny wire worms wriggling their way through your entire patch, knowing that there will be no more carrots until the following year unless I buy them fills me with grief.

Coming in to a greenhouse to check on seedlings who have all been fried to death when an unexpected Spring heat wave comes on so fast, that I can’t keep them cool enough, fills me with grief.

Seeing Oppossum dead by the side of the road fills me with grief.

Seeing Big Leaf Maple in Summer with their leaves all covered in powdery mildew making me think something’s not right, powdery mildew doesn’t look healthy on an otherwise healthy looking tree, fills me with grief.

Seeing and living with thick ass forest fire smoke now where our stunning western Washington blue skies that we wait 9 months out of the year to bask under, are now filled more days and more days and more days every year once August, September and October- peak fire season, rolls around. That fills me with fear and rage and grief and despair.

Watching a skinny white woman clad in black with a hardened look on her face, her mouth open in a bitter yell walk into the middle of two lanes of a major road and throw her shirt, and then her jacket onto the ground as the 18 wheelers slowed to a halt and waited for her to get out of the road, that fills me with grief.

Coming home to this property and not having any friends or extended family or kin (other than my more than human neighbors) within walking distance, not having any like minded neighbors, much less community who can come over in pinch to watch the kids, that fills me with enormous grief.

A friend of mine, Raven, works as a counselor in Boulder, CO, and he shared with me a couple years ago how he was doing his best to really get to know his neighborhood extending out in a twenty mile radius. I think about that a lot- how if you imagine out twenty miles all around from where you reside, how much history, riches, sadness, beauty and horrors might be encompassed in that twenty mile radius. This is one reason by a return to the horse and buggy life, or at the very least, WALKING MORE and getting the FUCK OUT OF OUR CARS, would help us in getting to now where we actually live. I don’t love to walk where I live was it’s semi-rural and people speed and there’s no real shoulder given the massive 4 foot deep agricultural ditches, plus dogs that run at us from their fields because people move out to the country in part b/c they want to shoot guns, and let their dogs shit wherever they please, and run all over, and not be told what to do.

I dunno. But I for one have a hard time turning my seeing off.

It seems baked into the times we live in and this greater “culture” that we are not supposed to KNOW THINGS DEEPLY. For when we do know things deeply, so often we learn some really sad things, so when you bring it up, so often the response from most people, at least in my life, is NOT simple listening/witnessing, and if you’re really lucky compassion and empathy, but defensiveness, as if a single human’s frail ego is solely responsible for the atrocities of the world? Why is that so often the response? I’ve certainly responded this way to loved one, and though I’m working on it, I am sure I’ll respond this way again. What has our capacity become so shriveled? Why can’t we bear it when someone lays a heavy burden at our doorstep? And if we can’t know things deeply, how does that cost us in our capacity to be brokenhearted and therefore actually grieve, when we need to be grieving?

Because if you aren’t weeping by the time you leave the house each day, are you really attuned to what’s going on?

I personally doubt it. And then what does it cost us to stay numb?

To refuse to know things deeply?

Tell me - what are you grieving lately?

What grief practices and/or rituals feel generative to you?

Why do you think witnessing and being witnessed is important to grief? Why don’t we do it for each other more often?

Who taught you about grief?
Where do you get to be sad?
Who do you get to be sad with?

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