The dance with grief
Last week myself and many who I work with, were given the news that a fellow rebel and activist had passed away. I didn’t know him well and yet his life made an imprint on me, an echo to which the reverberations will continue to be felt in my life for years to come.
This news strikes me at a poignant moment as I continue to be initiated into a dance with grief. I feel like a humble apprenticeship and novice to what lies ahead. But grief has been calling out and singing to the parts of my soul that are thirsty to be connected with life in it’s entirety. What I am quickly learning is that we have such a huge capacity for both sorrow and joy in equal measure.
This creative and passionate soul’s departure strikes me as a reminder of how precious life is. That we can be living our lives at full tilt, full of possibility and opportunities, yet all of sudden, out of nowhere, we are knocked from our living breathing bodies back into the ether. For the ones we loved they start the long pilgrimage towards learning to live with the grief of that loss.
In preparation of this apprenticeship I’m currently reading Francis Weller’s “The wild edge of sorrow” and I find deep comfort in his words . A kaleidoscope of his wisdom lands in the pit of my belly but right now this is the sentence that emerges:
“We must couple grief and gratitude in a way that encourages us to stay open to life.”
These unexpected events, the constant influx of media on the sorrows of the world from huge fires, melting ice, war, indigenous murders, the death of loved ones both familiar and far away, all of these can be a portal into the sorrow and sadness that these times evoke. There is much to be felt.
And yet through writing these words, acknowledging that there is pain, I can already feel the edges of my feeling body crack open, a little more light flooding in. I can begin to feel wonder and awe of the mystery of life as I sit on the train towards London. I can experience gratitude of being alive in this time where so much is dying and therefore see how precious everything is becoming. Through sitting with the very real and visceral reality of death, I am struck by gratitude for life and it’s brightness.
It’s as though the recent departure of this human and an intimacy with grief makes everything feel illuminated, like it’s all a bit more real. Like I can feel the sound of the trucks hurtling down the road beside me, like I can smell the wind and taste the air, like I sense the sorrow that we all carry and the vastness of life that wants to be lived through us. Grief cuts through the dullness that settles around us like a knife.
I wonder in courting these sorrowful parts of ourselves and beginning to befriend them, that they might carry the keys to open up the floodgate to gratitude.
Over the past year my work has morphed to focus heavily on the climate and ecological emergency and this transformation has been part of this initiation into grief. I have begun to understand the scale of the task at hand, that the task itself is not just environmental but societal, spiritual, moral. I know that I’m not alone in this, that those who are staring into the fire can see that we have a very bumpy time ahead of us and there is so much to unpack.
But I have never felt more grateful for every inch of nature and life that I encounter. That these days I walk from my home with utter admiration of the quiet resistance of trees, grass, shrubs and weeds that line the streets. That whilst I will forever be deeply in love with the vast open spaces of Dartmoor, that I am also serenaded by the little stretch of nature in my local park as I sit there often to listen to the birds and watch tree buds emerge. That I celebrate whenever I am graced by the presence of bees and look at spiders webs differently then I did a year ago.
It seems that grief is sister to love. We grieve because we love. If that is true then through the threshold of this journey with grief, I am discovering new depths of my experience of love; for myself, for people, for nature and for this blue planet. This love means that everything is worth fighting for — fighting isn’t even the word, this love mean it’s all worth working for, worth encountering, worth holding sacred, precious and essential.
This is why the dance of grief is worth learning the steps, fumbling the moves, messing up the feet. It is absolutely imperative to our experience of life and I believe that if we are curious, and continue to ask questions about it, that we may be surprised by what we discover.
