Let the Village Hold You

~ by Steve Aman and Mary Gleason

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.

― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

We have all experienced loss of one sort or another. The death of a loved one, the loss of a career, a home foreclosed on, divorce, pets dying, the loss of an anticipated future... These are all causes for grief. When the grief from any loss in life is pushed down, it remains there like a stone in the pit of our stomach, a heaviness that has an unwanted and unintended impact. 

Our western culture has mostly done an abysmal job of recognizing the importance of honoring grief, and in allowing grief to be visible, to be front and center when a loss in life calls for honest grieving. Older cultures have long recognized the importance of being open to grief, and especially the importance of communal grief. In many places around the world, one person's grief in the village becomes a cause for coming together in ritual to look the grief square in the eyes. 

Several of us locally recently engaged in a 3 month community grief ritual training with Francis Weller. We came out of that experience inspired to offer a grief ritual locally with some two dozen people present. We are doing this because it seems that everywhere we look around us, we see grief either emerging in the faces and words of folks everywhere, or in grief being pushed down in the manner that our culture encourages. The heaviness of collective grief is palpable. And, we recognize that the only cure for grief is to grieve. 

We have come to learn that community grieving offers something that we cannot get when we grieve by ourselves. Through validation, acknowledgement and witnessing, communal grieving allows us to experience a level of healing that is deeply and profoundly freeing.

― Sobonfu Some

In our hyper busy world, grief has been minimized and sanitized. The meta crisis has shown us the absolute importance of local and community. As we witness and experience many aspects of modernity moving into a hospice stage, we intend to help hospice the sanitized version of grieving while helping to re-birth the old ways of coming together in community to help each other on the journey of grief.

Furthermore, Buddhist author and activist Joanna Macy has taught us that there is a critical link between the expression of grief and the capacity for service. "A heart that breaks open", she says, "can hold the whole world". In feeling and expressing our responses to the painful conditions of our life and our world, our energy is freed up to engage in service to others and to the healing of our world.

-- 

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.

On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

― Arundhati Roy