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March 18, 2023
Weller, Francis, 1956- The wild edge of sorrow : rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief / Francis Weller ; foreword by Michael Lerner pages cm
There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive.
The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth.
“The cumulative grief of the world is overwhelming. . . . How can we possibly stay open to the endless assaults on the biosphere?”
“Deep in our bones lies an old intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community. . . . In a sense, it is a form of spiritual employment. . . . Hidden within the losses at this gate lies our diminished experience of who we truly are.”
We listen as the faces of loss are named: the death of a partner, a child, a marriage; the suicide of a parent or sibling; cancer and its rapacious consumption of life; a home lost through foreclosure; broken childhoods filled with alcoholism, violence, and neglect; the lingering scars of those who fought in wars; chronic illnesses that depress and debilitate; lives lost to addiction; and a prevailing sorrow for our struggling world.
much of the grief we carry is not personal; it doesn’t arise from our histories or experiences. Rather, it circulates around us, coming to us from a wider expanse, arriving on unseen currents that touch our souls.
we are not isolated cells partitioned off from other cells; we have semipermeable membranes that make possible an ongoing exchange with the great body of life.
Sorrow helps us remember something long intuited by indigenous people across the planet: our lives are intricately comingled with one another, with animals, plants, watersheds, and soil.
The personal and the planetary are inseparable, as is our healing.
Loss binds us together in a potent alchemy, confirming the heart’s intimacy with all things. Losing someone or something we love brings us into the shelter of our mutual grief. Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close. Alone and together, death and loss affect us all.
Today, however, the great rips and tears in the fabric of culture, the cascading crisis of ecological breakdowns, and the loss of our certainty in the continuation of life itself have begun to break through our collective denial.
Through grief, we are initiated into a more inclusive conversation between our singular lives and the soul of the world. We are coming to understand that there is no isolated self stranded in the cosmos; we are participants in an entwined and entangled net of connections with a continuous exchange of light, air, gravity, thought, color, and sound, all coalescing in the elegant dance that is our shared life.
and death-denying society. Consequently, grief and death have been relegated to what psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow.
Our refusal to acknowledge grief and death has twisted us into a culture riddled with death. One of Jung’s more chilling observations was that whatever we put into the shadow doesn’t sit there passively waiting to be reclaimed and redeemed; it regresses and becomes more primitive. Consequently, death rattles through our streets daily, in school shootings, suicides, murders, overdoses, gang violence, or through the sanctioned sacrifice of war dead.
Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty. By so doing, we may be able to feel our desire for life once again and remember who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred.
For the most part, 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.
We are most alive at the threshold between loss and revelation; every loss ultimately opens the way for a new encounter.
In fact, archetypal psychologist James Hillman once noted that being outraged is a sure sign that our soul is awake.
Each of these emotions and experiences has vitality in it, and that is our work: to be alive and to be a good host to whoever arrives at the door of our house.
Happiness, then, becomes a reflection of our ability to hold complexity and contradiction, to stay fluid and acce...
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We have forgotten the commons of the soul—the primary satisfactions that sustained and nourished the community and the individual for tens of thousands of years.
We have substituted a strange, frenzied obsession with “earning a living”—one of the most obscene phrases in our world—for the vital and fragrant life of the soul.
When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.
Our soul knows we are designed for a bigger, more sensuous, and more imaginative life. But we can go for days, weeks, months, a lifetime with only marginal encounters with beauty and the wild, only rarely sharing an intimate moment with a friend. We collude in the numbing as well, slipping into the void through alcohol, drugs, shopping, television, and work, anything to help us ward off the feelings of emptiness that come crashing at our door.
We were not meant to live shallow lives, pocked by meaningless routines and the secondary satisfactions of happy hour.
We are designed to encounter this life with amazement and wonder, not resignation and endurance. This is at the very heart of our grief and sorrow.
The dream of full-throated living, woven into our very being, has often been forgotten and neglected, replaced by a societal fiction of productivity and material gain. No
Grief is essential to finding and maintaining a feeling of emotional intimacy with life, with one another, and with our own soul. May you find nourishment in these pages for your soul and for your commitment to stay connected to the source of life.
No one goes in search of loss; rather, it finds us and reminds us of the temporary gift we have been given, these few sweet breaths we call life.
There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive.
Everything possesses soul. It is our myopia, our one-dimensional attention to things “human,” that leads us to see the world as an object, something to be controlled, manipulated, and consumed.
The earth is a revelation, offering itself to us daily in an astonishing array of beauty and suffering.
Soul returns to the world when we attend to the rhythms of nature, when we nourish our friendships with time and attention and in our daily participation with repairing the world. How well we do that will determine the fate of our communities and the planet.
The one emotion that has touched everyone is grief. It may be the grief we finally allow ourselves to feel for the life we did not choose. It may be our sorrow for losses that happened early in our life, losses that we were unprepared to grieve. It may be for relationships that fell apart, friendships that have vanished, times of violation and abandonment, or for the suffering we feel for our ravished earth.
How do we come to see grief as vital and necessary and not something only to be endured? To achieve this shift requires a re-visioning of grief, not as an event in our lives—a period of mourning—but as an ongoing conversation that accompanies us throughout life. Grief and loss are with us continually, shaping our walk through life, and in some real way, determining how fully we engage our lives.
An apprenticeship with sorrow requires a hands-on encounter in which we are invited to work with the materials of grief, its leaden weight, and the particular demands of melancholy.
John O’Donohue suggests. He writes, “What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. . . . When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us.”
How we approach our sorrows profoundly affects what comes to us in return.
When we come to our grief with reverence, we find ourselves in right relationship with sorrow, neither too far away nor too close.
Learning we can be with our grief, holding it softly and warmly, is the first task in our apprenticeship.
Approaching sorrow, however, requires enormous psychic strength. For us to tolerate the rigors of engaging the images, emotions, memories, and dreams that arise in times of grief, we need to fortify our interior ground. This is done through developing a practice that we sustain over time.
Grief work is not passive: it implies an ongoing practice of deepening, attending and listening.
It is an act of devotion, rooted in love and compassion.
One of the most essential skills we need to develop in our apprenticeship is our ability to stay present in our adult selves when grief arises.
Attunement is a particular quality of attention, wedded with affection, offered by someone we love and trust. This deep attention is what enables us to make painful experiences tolerable. We feel held and comforted, reassured and safe. The failure to provide a safe and nurturing space in times of loss and grief can precipitate the formation of a complex.
What had been severed for the sake of our preservation must now be rejoined for the sake of our healing.
Establishing a relationship with grief, developing practices that keep us steady in times of distress, and staying present in our adult selves are among the central tasks in our apprenticeship with sorrow.
The Mayan people say we all carry a deep spiritual debt for what we are given, which we can never fully repay. They say it is important that we do our best to honor this debt with our eloquence and displays of ritual beauty. Our culture has, by and large, failed to honor this debt, and the results are precisely what we see—a world rapidly being emptied by a never-ending hunger for more.
Grief work is soul work. It requires courage to face the world as it is and not turn away, to not burrow into a hole of comfort and anes-thetization.
