The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

by Francis Weller

Whenever I talk about this loss with groups of people, there is a feeling of surprise and then sadness. They quickly realize that their experience of who they are has been compromised. What was meant to be a far-ranging identity riddled with intimacies with wild iris, stellar clusters, earthworms, and humans has been whittled down to the narrowest hub. We exist in a state of isolation, cut off from an encompassing community of others. We often feel flattened under the weight of domestication, which smothers the heat and howl of our wild selves. We feel eviscerated, made tame by rules and conditioning that blanket the world with uniformity and mediocrity. This reduction in vitality and vividness induces a smoldering rage. Domestication mutes the poetry and music of the world, crushing the articulated and nuanced rhythms that accompany all living things, what poet Federico García Lorca called the canto hondo, the deep song of the world. And we are emptied.