I wanted to write about love today, but as soon as I sat down, grief slipped through the door and took a seat. The familiar tightness in the back of my throat, the subtle burn along the surface of my chest, these body queues are how I've learned to feel grief revealing itself, waiting to be seen.
I had long thought of grief as the heart-wrenching sobs of agony in the midst of acute pain or in the immediacy of loss. No, that's shock. Or perhaps the heavy cloak of grey mist settling slowly over the contours and dimensions of my life's landscape. No, that's depression. Or.. maybe grief was the gravity grip of hopelessness sinking me like quicksand. No, that's despair.
Grief is a mysterious unfolding. I continue to unlearn and re-learn every day what this force is, how it moves, what it seeks. Grief lingers. Drifts in and out. A strange, hungry ghost, relentlessly unsatiated by a culture that insists upon starving it. It surges and swells, devouring a bluebird sky into clouds of darkness, violent and unwieldy. It thrashes and groans, transforming a still, calm ocean, into an otherworldly squall. The debris scattered on the shoreline are grief's traces: fragmented glimpses into memories, longings, regrets, fears, all that lives unresolved and incomplete. Grief is one of the most potent portals into reconciling with our own mortality – we push it away, and it disobeys, so we reach for distractions to muzzle and numb it however we can. Grief speaks to us of our fears of death. As we mourn our losses, we mourn ourselves, we mourn the fragility of life itself.
Grief and love are inextricably entangled. To love is to be in a constant state of grieving. It is the love we feel, or the absence of it, or the unshakeable yearning for it, that invites grief to the table, too. Together they remind us to take nothing for granted, to hold reverence for even the smallest threads of resonance that remind us we are interwoven into the family of beings, the web of all life.
Grief asks more than any other feeling I've yet known. As I finally carve out more space for healing, the immense amount of time all of my stored grief needs to unfold and unfurl, coupled with the intense overwhelm of feeling as it rises to the surface regularly knocks me to my knees. It leaves me gasping for breath. Grief’s choppy waters ask nothing more of us than to surrender surrender surrender. And it is this exact holy force of grief that molds and shapes us, that facilitates our complete metamorphosis into our deepest awakenings, that beckons us into the depths of fully feeling where we can tap into the aching, pulsing, ecstatic, cosmic heartbeat of life itself saying "wake up! this passes swiftly!"
And here we are swimming in the relentless sea of unprocessed, undigested, unmetabolized grief as a third covid wave rushes like a tsunami toward our collective shores. And it's no wonder to me that we, as a collective, are not feeling our grief – that we are both resisting it and prohibited from it simultaneously. Grief is so inconvenient to the patriarchalcapitalist world order, to the systems that say "keep on keepin’ on", to the pressures that demand we show up to a flood of exhausting demands. It is this oppressive tapestry of interlocking dynamics that transmute life from the profoundly sensuous and sublime gift that it is in truth, into a struggle for survival. And it is grief that opens the portal to vibrant aliveness again. Grief that needs time, space, breath to be fully felt, it needs ritual and rites of passage to be honored for its initiatory impact. How is grief even accessible in the grind?
I often think of the last stage of shedding a snake must endure to ensure its own life. Every snake must temporarily blind itself to complete its shedding cycle - as slippery oils build up between the old, too tight skin, and the spacious, shiny new one, those oils also form between old and new spectacles (like contact lenses that take the place of eyelids), meaning they can't see until the shedding process is complete. This process takes 4-7 days, and a snake may undergo this 4-12 times each year. Further, it is in captivity that a snake attempting to undergo this wild, divine transformation is most at risk: improper humidity levels dry the oils up too fast, which is the primary cause of incomplete sheds. When a snake fails to shed properly, skin fragments left behind can lead to a buildup of bacteria, which can then cause scale rot. Unshed spectacles are also a hazard. This bacteria can lead to severe eye infections and may render the snake permanently blind, or may even cost the snake its eyes.
Are we much different? Are we not dying to become over and over again in this life? Are we not trapped in incomplete shedding processes, held in various permutations of captivity that suppress our wild, divine, animal bodies? Are we not confronting increasing disabling capacities to our functioning as we try to withstand the pain of the sick systems all around us? Is there time and space in dominant culture for humans to die? To mourn the spiritual death of our old selves, let alone our and everyone’s physical death? We don't have systems that hold us in our grief, that make space for what grief needs. We are the snake. We are not meant to be incarcerated. We are not meant to have our psychospiritualbiological needs thwarted.
In scattered conversations over the last many months I’ve heard a louder call for grief rituals. I know we’re trying. I know we’re steadily finding our way out of all that seeks to keep us stuck in a feverdream of constantly outrunning both death and life. Grief is slipping through each of our doorways, asking to be met at our tables. Are we listening? Are we pouring a cup of tea?
As an invitation: how might this wintering season bring you closer to the great teacher of grief? What are the tender, safe, supported ways you might inquire into how grief feels in your body, how it yearns to bring you closer to life?