What are you grieving?
"My heart is broken, I never want it to mend"
CW: eating animals, murdered babies and children, war, legacy of enslaved people
What are you grieving these days?
If "Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses,” as Martín Prechtel writes in his book The Smell of Rain on Dust, are we truly loving life if we are not grieving regularly?
If grief is a practice more so than a feeling, how is your practice faring? What constitutes a grief practice? Does it matter whether we grieve together or alone? How does our grief- grieved or withheld, shape our lives, our families, our children, our More Than Human Kin and neighbors, the places we call home? If we never grieve out loud does our grief even exist?
This past weekend I attended the 40th birthday party of one of my permaculture mentors now turned friend. It started mid afternoon and lasted well into the night with those camping out (my husband and toddler among that crowd) making it through a rare-for-us- raucous rainstorm of thunder and lightning. Around a potluck feast of familiar and new faces, I caught up with several friends from our permaculture design training (PDC for short or permaculture camp as I like to call it) from a couple summers ago. In the midst of talking about the joy and challenges of food growing, building community, dealing with nitrogen deficiencies, raising children, and sibling dynamics, I burst out crying. Out of seemingly nowhere, I just starting crying about Palestinian babies. And it felt both true and odd to cry, because alive in me all in the moment were many splendid things- the never ending rage and grief I carry + the socially conditioned part me of that cautioned "this isn't the space for your tears. this isn’t the right time for your rage” + the now-trained-community grief tender + embodied emboldened griever who knows that tears are abso-fucking-lutely a sane and heartful response to Palestinian babies murdered via a sniper bullet to their heart and are welcome at any place/any time.
Yes it was due to the particular friend I was talking too. But it also has to do with the fact that in that moment as I held my chubbythighedmilkluscious baby to my chest, who’d been cooed over and cuddled around, I was also a Mother to a baby who will never make it to his first birthday. I was also a Mother holding her baby dead in her arms. I was also a Mother searching for my child under rubble. “We are all Gaza” writes a woman I follow online reporting from bed, resting after learning by surprise she was pregnant with twins, and then just as quickly learning that the tiny embryos inside her were dead. To be a Mother most days is to walk around with a splayed open wound in the middle of my chest with a ramrod spine and feet tough as nails- the vigilant nature of motherhood is not for the faint of heart. I hear a plane roar by and wonder what it must feel like to Mother under bomb after bomb after gunshot after gunshot after explosion after cry after scream after whimper. What it must feel like to have an entire web of family members murdered in an airstrike- to be the only left… for now…
It seems I am reminded all the time of the greater horrors right and how it is all connected. Earlier this Spring I saw a child playing in a parking lot puddle while their parents stayed inside the dilapidated RV- an unhoused family, a common and increasing sign of heartbreak while our government sends more billions for munitions to kill innocent people. I haven’t cried about Palestinian babies much, if not at all to anyone except my husband. Writing about it and venting about it online is a form of socially sanctioned distanced grief, but for some reason I have been unable to fully access it with friends. I mostly cry in the cars these days- there’s a spot when the connector highway opens up and starts to town and I get to that stoplight at Sunset and Orleans and there, when I’m finally side by side with cars, just that amount of witnessing, lets loose my tears. And damn it’s not like anyone’s noticing me at all weeping in my car, but just their presence is the shard of witnessing needed. Grief, by design, is not something we are supposed to do alone.
In peacetime, Gaza funerals were large family affairs.
The corpse would be washed and wrapped in a shroud, according to Islamic tradition. After prayers over the body at a mosque, a procession would take it to the graveyard, where it would be laid on its right side facing east, toward Mecca.
The rituals are the most basic way to honor the dead, said Hassan Fares. “This does not exist in Gaza.”
Twenty-five members of Fares’ family were killed by an airstrike on Oct. 13 in northern Gaza. Without gravediggers available, Fares dug three ditches in a cemetery, burying four cousins, his aunt and his uncle. Survivors whispered quick prayers over the distant hum of warplanes. - AP NEWS
Today I donated $100 to a GoFundMe for a friend whose house just went up in flame. Like that she and her family lost everything and are in a hotel.
Last week I donated $100 to a GoFundMe for an old friend back in SC. He has some horrible cancer and can’t work and his partner can’t work because she is his only caregiver and the hospital he needs treatment at is hours away of driving and because this is America the medical debt is racking up.
The week before that I donated $100 to a Palestinian family raising funds to flee their homeland.
The week before that $35 for a raffle my herbalist friend was running to support Palestinian families relocate.
Weeks before that in honor of Juneteenth and a call in from sex educator Ericka Hart for all the black people to drop their cashapp/venmos in the comments I gave $100 to a bodyworker doing rad healing work in her community and another $100 to a single mom.
Black people were forced to build the entire economic infrastructure for this country but white people STILL own 95% of all rural land.
Let this Juneteenth holiday also serve as a reminder that Black people fought and freed ourselves in 1863 and again in 1865 in Galveston, TX. No piece of paper or decree from our enslavers freed us (that just as quickly could enslave us and did). Our ancestors freed themselves through rebellion, revolt, escape, maroonage, armed resistance, spiritual work and warfare, over the course of 400 plus years.
On this day, reflect, meditate, STOP STEALING BLACK CULTURE and supporting the theft of Black culture! White people don’t need to be having no cookouts, anytime you think I could go buy a hot dog, rage against the state! Write to your elected official and demand that Black people receive reparations.- Ericka Hart via her Instagram account for Juneteenth 2024.
You can still pay reparations to someone-Pay up here!
Meanwhile my direct messages on my Instagram account are filled with people now asking me for money. I logged on to my Venmo account to see a flurry of messages from a woman saying if I can just give her $5 that would help her not be on the street tonight.
Every single time I drive to town there is someone begging at the intersection.
The amount of need is so great. And it’s increasing.
In one month I have donated away all of the money this little newsletter makes in a year… in case you were wondering… and this isn’t a flex. It’s just a reminder to not hoard your money. We can’t take it with us. Everyone can give something. Will these $100s of dollars here and there do much against the Grendel ravaging beast that is the United States Military Complex that devours and destroys every beautiful thing in its sight? Of course not. But giving away money is a form of a practice of grief. By engaging with the suffering of the world we keep our hearts open.
And of course when their is time and money attending a community grief ritual is an incredible way to defrost our hearts.
Numbness is a socially approved response to the deluge of atrocities we have the burdensome privilege of being able to be aware of. Brother Blue was a storyteller from Boston, which is where Stephen Jenkinson, founder of Orphan Wisdom School (OWS) (of which many of of you know I was a student of for several years) studied. Stephen, as a young university student had the great fortune (or perhaps mis-fortune- I can just hear Stephen saying this with a wry tone) to be taken under Brother Blue’s wing in a kind of informal bardic training. Thus, Brother Blue’s wisdom definitely came through on more than one occasion during my time as an OWS student. On the incessant question of how do we keep going in times like these, Stephen quoted something Brother Blue once told him "My heart is broken; I never want it to mend.”
My heart is broken
I never
want
it
to
mend.
And you know when I heard that I just started bawling because while it confused the hell out of me, and pissed me off because man I’m an American and I want a fix! I want an end to my heartbreak, I don’t want more of this stuff!! But ALSO I knew exactly what he meant by that, and it just straightened me in that cold water plunge kind of way -sobered me/ defeated me and filled me with gut punch love.
So that’s what’s been on my mind as of late… how do I return to this knowing?
Those words for me, are a kind of a grief practice- like fingering the beads of the rosary- being with those words regularly over the past decade has really done something to me. And while I’d love to say I’m walking around all wings wide, I’m not. Still here grappling with numbing out, with bitterness, with rage, with despair. That’s why grief is a practice. That’s why I keep going.
Tell me below, if you’d like- what are you doing these days to keep your heart broken?