Grief Work
CW: brief mention of self injury
Today I woke up early, nursed the toddler, damp from the diaper that had leaked in the night, who had been brought to my bed by her father, morning cranky asking for “mee mee, mee mee, mee mee” and then I kissed the toddler, nursed her on the other side, and called to her father over the baby monitor to come take her away.
I plunged back into sleep and dreamed deeply for the first time in a while. In the dream I finally confronted, was able to speak truth to a former lover of mine about some old hurts, seeking to clarify things I only now feel like I have access to understanding; the words only coming too me by another recent upset, and of course in a strange twist of reminding me that Time is anything but linear- 4 different incidences from many years ago all alive in well calling for me to attend to them. In my dream we were at a gathering by the sea (much like the grief ritual I just attended over the weekend, held in Bow, WA at a (of all places) Christian retreat center (more on that later), overlooking an inlet salt water lake which was just a few feet from a salt water bay that extends out into the Salish Sea. The gathering in my dream was more raucous in typical music festival style, with rowdy partiers drifting here and there. However, we were all barefoot, and at some point in the dream I lost my shoes- a simple pair of rubber bottomed black canvas barefoot style sneakers. My friend and I were doing our own thing, with a plan to meet back up in the small caravan we were staying in together. I went, frantic looking for my shoes. Every where I turned there were piles of shoes- all foot shaped, barefoot shaped shoes (which in reality I am turning towards more and more in effort to be kinder to my feet/body over all and feel the ground beneath more), piles and piles and piles of shoes. (which as I write this I now I feel a swell of sorrow rise up when I remember the pile of shoes in the entry way to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. which I visited several times as an adolescent, and for years as a tween read countless books about the Holocaust- a predilection already for wanting to know and make sense of the world’s immense sorrows and horrors). In the dream I finally found my shoes, and delighted ran back to find my friend. He was already in bed, shirtless and handsome as ever, and much like in real life, in dream life, my heart pitterpatted and my cheeks bloomed with blushing. Then I told him my suspicions about ways I see misogny (even in our consenual non-monogmous arrangement) has crept in, me once again in a state of kow towing to a man- my wonderings put together by almost 5 years of relationship, woven with scars and wisdom from past heart breaks and rejections. He looked concerned, began to speak, and I shushed him angrily, saying “I just need you to listen, don’t interrupt.” So he shut up.I woke from the dream bleary eyed thinking of him, knowing I need to have this conversation in real life at some point, but terrified to do so.
It is not the first dream I have had where I have been able to practice giving or receiving news that is hard or difficult to say. I remain in awe and gratitude of my dream life, the dream time, and all the intuition, hard teachings and wisdom my dreams have offered me over the years. Dreams continue to be a space where I get to reckon with things I’m not yet able to reckon with in real time.
In that way I see dreams as a form of Grief Work, and I’m also writing about this particular dream because I am just 2 days out from an Grief Retreat.
I first wrote about this on my Instagram page @wildbeloved and am expanding it here where I have more word count.
Spring is so weirdly and delightfully here- I came home to snow on the mountains after sleeping by the Salish Sea for two nights. I drove down on a Friday with opening circle time starting promptly at 2pm. I arrived in a sideways rain pelting us, and went to sleep with the wind howling. The sky itself seemed to be raining down its grief welcoming and warning us to the heavy good work that lay ahead. “How appropriate I thought.” I’ve heard a place knows who is coming long before they show up. Then, when the history and land acknowledgements were made on behalf of the local tribe the Samish, whose name translates to mean “the people who give,” I learned that there is a burial ground on site of this now Christian camp where the Samish still come to pay their respects, and is off limits (of course) to us settlers. The grief tantamount in this knowing is hard to convey through words. It was a strange wonder to be held in a space where this hard knowing came up again and again. To grapple with that knowing is itself a form of activism.
I gathered in a big way in a big group (40ish people or so) over the weekend for ceremonial grief work.
It was my second time in a grief retreat like this or “grief camp” as another participant called it. The space was stunningly crafted, held and tended by an experienced team of mostly women, and facilitated mainly by 4 people and I was in awe of the facilitation by the two silver haired ones- one a spry woman with a legacy of midwifery practice and one a bald man with the deepest of voices, a most tender heart and song after song after song to share with us.
With no intact villages these days, no intact cultural traditions about how to grieve, what songs to sing, what sounds to make, we have become quite a grief stunted and grief illiterate culture. In the ways of mystery and spirit prevailing, elders in the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso got wind that people in the west did not know how to grieve, and that our inability to grieve was/is having disastrous effects in our country and around the world. So they sent help. The help came in the form of Malidoma Somé, and Sobonofu Somé, who taught grief ritual to some people here on the west coast over 20 years ago. While neither of the Somé’s are still here in physical form, their legacy continues on in this powerful ritual that has naturally shifted and changed, from what I gather, to be more place based and culturally relevant to the mostly all white audience drawn to this work.
Grief activist and teacher, Francis Weller, writes about “The Five Gates of Grief”
The Five Gates of Grief
Everything We Love, We Will Lose
The Places that have not known Love
The Sorrows of the World
What We Expected and Did Not Receive
Ancestral Grief
Over the weekend the two that really stood out to me were Earth Grief (the sorrows of the world) and Ancestral Grief. As the oldest of my parents four children together I often have felt that I inherited a heavy load right from birth. I was incredibly sensitive and empathic as a child, and continue to be so. My mother’s first two daughters were taken from her and now, as my language about ancestry, spiritual work, grief, and epigenetics grows, I wonder what silent grief was transmitted to me, her first daugther who got to stay with her full time. I felt this old grief and rage rise up in me on behalf of my mother- as I knelt on the grief alter (blanketed tumbling mats facing a beautiful assemblage of cedar bows with flowers tucked in here and there, rising up over a row of flickering tea lights in small glass votives, with our strange and beautiful grief bundles placed all about), I felt some sense of how she was treated back then in the 60s and early 70s when her first daugther was put up for adoption and her second gone to be raised primarily by her father, given my mother’s “feminist” status. But even as I write this I wonder “how did my Mother actually feel?” Could part of this feminine held grief and rage I feel be even older too- stories of my grandmothers grandmothers grandmothers all raised in the South - Jim Crow, Southern Baptist Republican South, and before that too- a South raised up on the legacy of plantation life, rural life, and intense and pervasive racial violence and segregation? All of that seems to have made a home in my body. All of those things are making home in all of our bodies, which is why somatic grief work like gathering in community like this lodge, or at the very minimum doing the body practices laid out in Resmaa Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands are crucial.
We cannot talk our way out of grief.
We must move and dance and cry together. We must make offering of our grief via the conduits of singing, dancing, chanting, screaming, altars created, burden bundles created, prayers made and sung over fire, offerings burned over fire, prayers spoke out loud in front of others.
There is always hard magic at gathering like these.
“Lean into your discomfort,” they kept telling us. And yet I don’t want to talk about my shame for what kept rising up. For me I kept being drawn too and reminded of my history with some hard shit I thought was “over” hahahah yeh right. This hard ache twitching inside me, my old scars on my wrist, my arms, my upper thighes began to burn again. Wanting so bad to run away or scream at the person who was mirroring back to me this kind of desperate soothing where the only thing that brings relief is a sharp hot thing to the flesh. “Take it to the grief altar. Tell your own story,” was the advice given to me by one of the space holders, who, in a desperate moment, I reached out too for some one on one time. I did not need to tell this story. I simply waited until the grief ritual started up again, and yeh I could have been the first to run, but still I held back until my chest was cracking open, and I knelt on that mat silent crying, then heaving and rocking then wailing and keening. When I rose an older woman I had connected with several times over meals held her arms out to me, and I smiled and said, “First I need to go bash some shit” so then I went over and cracked a foam wrapped plastic baseball bat ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk across the pile of rolled up yoga mats, letting out a yelping war cry of “take that you mother fucker.” Then I collapsed in her arms and another shudder of grief trembled out of me. Triumphant, I rejoined the “village” who welcomed me back with cheers and yips amidst the singing and drumming. Later, I burnt my burden bundle with a prayer to finally release my legacy/inherited of self-hatred and self-harm.
All I can say is have you really lived if you haven’t been a witness to an older woman on her hands and knees weeping and wailing, who then, when you think she is exhausted of all her tears for the time being (because we are never done with grief) and ready to get to her feet to return to the “village,” she beckons you to come down to her and you do, and you get down behind her and you take her in your arms and you cradle her like your own child and with your embrace a whole new flood of grief exits her body as she shakes and shakes and trembles and trembles and weeps in your arms
And to see grown ass handsome beautiful men with snot dripping down their face as they have been weeping and wailing on their knees for some 40 minutes straight is one of the most redemptive beautiful things I have ever seen
Sacred work on both griever & witness end
And yes I had my time prostrate on the ground before the grief alter weeping and wailing keening and screaming for old old old old and current hurts- my own, my mothers, my mothers mothers mothers, my fathers mothers my fathers mothers mothers, my more than human relations - orca, salmon, cedar, big leaf maple, river/ the worlds heaviness/ my beautiful trans friends/ mothers alone with newborn babies/where are my people?/the news cycle of greed and destruction/all to slough off some of this grief and rage so that my children and my childrens childrens children don’t have to carry so much
Making up for the generation
after generation
after generation
after generation
after generation
who did not
who could not
who would not
cry
want to learn more about grief rituals in the PNW?
Here are the websites for the facilitators whose grief retreats/grief lodges I’ve attended
https://sacredgroves.com/blessings/grief-retreat/
https://pacifichealingcircles.com/- Mary and Siena also host ongoing online grief ritual