Dear tender-hearted friends,

To say the last several years have been intense is an understatement. It doesn't appear that we're heading into a decade of ease and relief. Growing our capacity to grieve well is an essential skill for our personal and communal well-being. Grieving well is vital for keeping our hearts open and tender. Grieving well is essential for keeping our hearts permeable to beauty and resilient to despair.

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. Maybe you're grieving the absence of community and the 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. 

"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.”   – Francis Weller