Hi friends, it was so lovely to hear from some of you! As a quick recap, this newsletter is an experimental conversation on what’s needed to create a world with more Beauty & Tenderness. In the spirit of experimenting, I have something else I’d like to try with you — a special gathering next week! (Invitation at the end.) I’d love for you to join, or to forward this to others who might like to join. With love, M.
I don’t know about you, but my lungs have been heavy, almost leaden since George Floyd’s murder. As I’ve cycled between rage, grief, and despair, it’s been difficult to function by day. At night, I want to sleep, but my body aches with grief. Never before have I felt this physically connected to our collective pain.
That said, in spite of how brutal the last weeks have been, I have deep trust in grief. Grief wants to renew us. After all, we grieve that which is worthy of our love.
It’s just that as Americans, we tend not to be great at grief since we so love sunshine and progress. We toss grief in the junk drawer and often hide our tears (perhaps letting bathroom stalls witness them). By shutting it down, we believe we’ll get back to “happy” sooner. But in denying the descent, we deny the beauty, grace, and courage that lie in the skillfully navigated ascent after grief.
Grief, if we heed its call, beckons us to be broken open. It invites us to release the old and step over the edge into a more alive, more soulful way of being. And if we let it, it summons us — in the words of Francis Weller — “to see the places that have not known love.”
Grief might just be the thing that saves us as a country.
Photo by Good Free Photos on Unsplash
My relationship with grief wasn’t always this way. My turning point came after my dad’s sudden death 7 years ago on Independence Day. Most of you reading this already know the details of that day, so I’ll share what happened after.
I went back to work two weeks after he died. I knew I needed more space to grieve, but I didn’t take it. It was a terrible decision. My grief was so heavy that I felt dead inside, or I was sobbing so hard on commutes that it was difficult to drive. Eventually I was so wrought and raw from trying to fight it that I needed an Eat, Pray, Love moment.
I took a sabbatical and spent a few months at an ashram. Even though I finally had space to be present with my grief, it was still a challenge. A resident of the ashram said to me, “I wouldn’t have known you’re grieving. You look happy.”
And in retrospect, there was a wisdom in my body not wanting to go fully into my grief all at once. I had such an enormous backlog of things ungrieved that if I had fully opened the floodgates, it probably would have overwhelmed me. (See my last post for why). At that time, my body simply needed to be nurtured and nourished.
It took returning home and being with loved ones and mentors I deeply trusted to start the deeper process of grieving.
Outside my trusted inner circle, I felt like a leper. Most people tried to be polite, but I could sense that most wanted to run. In my messy grief, I was no longer a “winner” who had things under control. One friend even asked bluntly: “When are you going back to normal?” That stung.
Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash
The truth was that grief didn’t want me to go back to an unhealthy ‘normal’.
Grief wanted me to stop contorting myself to win proxies for love like power, prestige and success. It wanted me to know love directly — through belonging, aliveness and authenticity.
As Americans, we’ve been raised to believe our inner world should be divorced from our outer world. And it’s this split at the root of our country’s long-standing pandemic of loneliness. We have failed to accept that grief is elemental to life; and just like all things elemental — air, light and water — it moves through all of us.
Grief wants us to turn toward it. It wants us to see the parts that feel tender so that they can rejoin life too. It wants all of us to belong.
And the unexpected grace in this process was that the more I turned toward community, the enormity of the grief no longer felt so heavy or overwhelming. My friend Danica Tiu sums it up beautifully:
“Grief is like packing and moving. On our own, it’s daunting. But with other people we don’t need to shoulder everything.”
This is even more true of the immense collective grief that has the country on edge right now. To wrap our arms around the enormity of despair, death, and ‘places in our country that have not known love’, we need each other to match its scale. We can certainly stretch individually by letting go of coping strategies that keep us small (like numbing, splitting, and distraction). But the only way we can meet the scale of the injustice that needs to be healed is to wrap our arms around it collectively. And the more this country meets the places that have not known love, the more we’ll be able to let go of the structures of systemic injustice.
Photo by Julian Wan on Unsplash
My hunch is that one of the reasons there have been over 2000 protests across the country in the last few weeks (and 200+ more expected this Juneteenth weekend) is that we’re hungry to not be alone in our grief. We want to be witnessed in our outrage and tears so that we don’t keep collectively pushing these injustices away.
In a way, the protests are a form of community ritual common in indigenous cultures, but that we’re largely starved of in our culture. They create a space outside the norm to acknowledge that something important happened, and that we can’t be the same again.
While I don’t know how our country will change, I do know from my years of being intimate with grief there’s no way around it, only through it. Even better if it’s done in community.
In the words of civil rights leader and elder john a. powell,
“Turning toward each other is 90% of the healing.”
We can’t get rid of grief. But we can hold it in something bigger than ourselves.
To this end, I’d like to invite you to join a collective grief ritual that I’ll be co-facilitating on Saturday June 27th @ 6:30-8pm PT via Zoom. We’ll support you in gently connecting with whatever grief may be present for you through guided reflection prompts and a visualization. Then in small confidential groups you’ll have a chance to share what’s coming up for you around grief so that it no longer needs to be held alone. And to close, as a community we’ll release the grief that’s ready to move to one of the elements — air, light/fire, or water — to acknowledge how it moves through all of us.
All funds raised will go to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, though no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Would love for you to join, or to invite others who might like to!
Melissa
PS, If you’d like to go deeper with exploring grief, I highly recommend Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe here to have more pieces like this one lovingly delivered directly to your inbox. And if you enjoyed this post, why not share it?