Growing our capacity to grieve well is an essential skill for personal and communal well-being.
Grieving well is vital for keeping our hearts open and tender in this very hard, very beautiful world.
Grieving well is essential for staying permeable to beauty and resilient to despair.
–Erin Geesaman Rabke
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A note from Erin:
Dear Beautiful Human,
Today is the day! Doors are open for our 4-day Community Grief Tending Ritual to be held in Salt Lake City over Memorial Day weekend, May 22-25. Read more and apply here.
You may be grieving the loss of a loved one, a loss of income, a loss of wellness or physical capacity, a loss of lifestyle, or a loss of the illusion of certainty. You may be grieving loneliness or longing for more solitude in a busy life. Maybe you’re grieving the suffering of others, violent deaths from mass shootings, wars, and genocides. You may be grieving systemic racism or the increasing inequity around the globe. Maybe you’re grieving the ongoing destruction of our beautiful natural world, the disappearance of birds, the many wildfires, floods, and storms each year. Perhaps you’re grieving the ongoing extinction of species, the reversal of human rights, or the devastating loss of wilderness and beauty. Or maybe your grief is for the divisiveness and meanness unfolding in a polarised civilisation. Your grief may be rooted in personal regrets, pregnancy loss or fertility struggles, or a beloved pet dying. Perhaps it’s difficult relationships, a health crisis, a relationship loss, or general overwhelm. Perhaps you’re carrying the weight of your ancestors’ grief, or maybe you’re grieving the world we’re leaving for the future ones. Perhaps you’re grieving the absence of community and longing for a more life-giving culture. Perhaps you’re carrying all of this and more. Whatever constitutes your multitudes of grief, one thing is certain: It’s far too heavy to carry alone.
Spending time with kindred grieflings is one of the most sacred and beautiful parts of my life. If you haven’t yet experienced it, you might be surprised by how not only deeply moving and healing a 4-day grief retreat can be, but also how joyful, funny, full of song, poetry, deep connection, and spontaneous gratitude as well. Our brilliant colleagues and beloved friends, Alexandre Jodun and Alyona Kobevka are coming from the Sacred Valley in Peru to cohost this gathering, and we are so looking forward to it!! The spots often fill quickly, so you may wish to apply soon.
As our dear friend Francis Weller wrote so beautifully, “The sheer weight of these personal and collective sorrows is enough to crush our hearts, forcing us to turn away and find solace in anaesthesia and distraction. When we come together, however, and share these stories of sorrow in grief rituals, something begins to change. When our sorrows are witnessed and held within a community of compassion, grief can surprisingly turn to joy, to a love emboldened for all that surrounds us. Love and loss have been eternally entwined. To acknowledge our grief is to free our love to fall outwards into the waiting world. Something is stirring in the depths of the times. Our collective denial appears to be cracking. We can no longer deny the fact that the world is radically changing. We sense in our bones the breakdowns occurring and, along with it, our hearts feel weighted with grief. It may be our shared sorrows, stirred by our love of this singular, irreplaceable planet, that will ultimately activate our communal commitment to respond to the rampant denigration of the world. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.” Join us.
We’re also excited to remind you that we will be hosting a free information session about our upcoming 13-month training program, Refugia, on Sunday, January 4th, at 11 am MT for 90 minutes. Please join us! Please feel free to share the invitation with anyone you think might resonate. It will be rich. We’ll share a bit about the inspiration behind this offering, we’ll read some gorgeous poetry, we’ll share about the learning territory we’ll delve into through the year, and we’ll make time for questions. It’s a no-pressure gig. Sign up here to join us. All registrants will receive a recording, so feel free to sign up even if you can’t join us live.
I’ve shared this quote from Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel many times before, and it’s always in my heart, so I’ll share it here again, as a heart wish for all of us as we emerge into this new calendar year.
“May this new year bring you well-being, joy, and limitless opportunities to grow. Let’s be fierce in our commitment to value and utilize even the most challenging circumstances as a way to deepen our understanding and cultivate compassion for others (as well as ourselves.) Let’s continuously find creative and skillful ways to serve living beings and this precious planet, our home, and look at life around us as the rich ground for awakening from self-absorption. If we can do this, how can we possibly lose?” (Italicized words added by me.)
Isn’t it amazing that we can opt out of the culture wars, opt out of the values and habits foisted onto us by the overculture, the ones that don’t resonate in our hearts, and choose to live deepening compassion, learning, and our capacity to serve life instead? I find it miraculous.
We can meet grief of all kinds in beautiful ways, such that our hearts become softer and larger rather than smaller and harder. What a miracle. Let’s do it together.
May it be so.
From my heart,
Erin
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