The Wild Edge of Sorrow, page 2
Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty. By so doing, we may be able to feel our desire for life once again and remember who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred.
I wrote this book for a number of reasons, most notably, to restore soul to grief work and grief to soul work. I feel grief has been colonized by the clinical world, taken hostage by diagnoses and pharmaceutical regimes. For the most part, grief is not a problem to be solved, not a condition to be medicated, but a deep encounter with an essential experience of being human. Grief becomes problematic when the conditions needed to help us work with grief are absent. For example, when we are forced to carry our sorrow in isolation, or when the time needed to fully metabolize the nutrients of a particular loss is denied, and we are pressured to return to “normal” too soon. We are told to “get on with it” and “get over it.” The lack of courtesy and compassion surrounding grief is astonishing, reflecting an underlying fear and mistrust of this basic human experience. We must restore the healing ground of grief. We must find the courage, once again, to walk its wild edge.
Grief is always, in some way, accompanying us. There are times when the presence of sorrow is acute: a partner dies, a home turns to ash in a fire, a marriage dissolves and we find ourselves alone. These seasons in our lives are intense and require a prolonged time to honor what the soul needs, to fully digest the grief. Sorrow is a sustained note in the song of being alive. To be human is to know loss in its many forms. This should not be seen as a depressing truth. Acknowledging this reality enables us to find our way into the grace that lies hidden in sorrow. We are most alive at the threshold between loss and revelation; every loss ultimately opens the way for a new encounter.
In turn, by restoring grief to soul work, we are freed from our one-dimensional obsession with emotional progress. This “psychological moralism” places enormous pressure on us to always be improving, feeling good, and rising above our problems.2 Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling that we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard. This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld, where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coated in a mantle of shame. People in my practice routinely apologize for their tears or for feeling sad.
I am an advocate for a soul psychology that senses vitality in every emotion, whatever life offers to us in the moment. We will have times of being happy, which is cause for celebration. We will, however, also have times of sorrow and loneliness. Moods will come upon us and events will occur that evoke anger and outrage in us. In fact, archetypal psychologist James Hillman once noted that being outraged is a sure sign that our soul is awake. Each of these emotions and experiences has vitality in it, and that is our work: to be alive and to be a good host to whoever arrives at the door of our house. Happiness, then, becomes a reflection of our ability to hold complexity and contradiction, to stay fluid and accept whatever arises, even sorrow.
I also wrote this book to address the two primary sins of Western civilization: amnesia and anesthesia—we forget and we go numb. These two sins account for an amazing range of sorrows. When we are lost in what author Daniel Quinn calls The Great Forgetting, we slip into a mode of being that neglects the wider bonds of our belonging. We forget that we are all tangled together in this nest of life, that the air we breathe is shared, as is our water and soil, and that everything is bound together in a seamless web of life. When we forget, we are able to do untold damage to our watersheds, to one another, and to the entire earth.
Modern technological society has forgotten what it feels like to be embedded in a living culture, one rich with stories and traditions, rituals and patterns of instruction that help us become true human beings. We live in a society with little regard for matters of soul. As a consequence, we need books and workshops on grief, on relationships and sexuality, on play and creativity. These are symptoms of a great loss. We have forgotten the commons of the soul—the primary satisfactions that sustained and nourished the community and the individual for tens of thousands of years.3 We have substituted a strange, frenzied obsession with “earning a living”—one of the most obscene phrases in our world—for the vital and fragrant life of the soul. We have sadly turned the ritual of life into the routine of existence. This forgetting has reduced the arc of our experience down to its tiniest hub. The wider reach of our beings has faded, and the subtle and nuanced gravity of contact with the world has been diminished. This is heartbreaking!
Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “What we cannot speak about, we pass over in silence.”4 We have forgotten the primary language of grief. As a consequence, the terrain of sorrow has become unfamiliar and estranged, leaving us confused, frightened, and lost when grief comes near. The haunting silence that Wittgenstein speaks of lingers as a fog over our lives, placing large areas of experience outside of our reach. When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.
Our strategies of anesthesia are equally astonishing. Entire industries have emerged to keep the senses dulled and distracted. Our need to be anesthetized is rooted in our smoldering dissatisfaction with the meager existence we have been offered by this society, itself a profound source of grief. We suffer from what the poet William Blake called “divine discontent.” Our soul knows we are designed for a bigger, more sensuous, and more imaginative life. But we can go for days, weeks, months, a lifetime with only marginal encounters with beauty and the wild, only rarely sharing an intimate moment with a friend. We collude in the numbing as well, slipping into the void through alcohol, drugs, shopping, television, and work, anything to help us ward off the feelings of emptiness that come crashing at our door.
We were not meant to live shallow lives, pocked by meaningless routines and the secondary satisfactions of happy hour. We are the inheritors of an amazing lineage, rippling with memories of life lived intimately with bison and gazelle, raven and the night sky. We are designed to encounter this life with amazement and wonder, not resignation and endurance. This is at the very heart of our grief and sorrow. The dream of full-throated living, woven into our very being, has often been forgotten and neglected, replaced by a societal fiction of productivity and material gain. No wonder we seek distractions. Every sorrow we carry extends from the absence of what we require to stay engaged in this “one wild and precious life.”5 And every sorrow is made more difficult to metabolize by that absence. Grief work offers us a trail leading back to the vitality that is our birthright. When we fully honor our many losses, our lives become more fully able to embody the wild joy that aches to leap from our hearts into the shimmering world.
Lastly, this book is a prayer, a plea on behalf of our beloved earth. I write to speak to the deepening sense of loss we are feeling as the life systems of our planet show continuing signs of strain and decline. This pain is intense and almost unendurable. I write for the sake of our communities and for the salmon, ospreys, monarch butterflies, grizzlies, and for the generations to come. This book, then, is an act of remembrance through which our eternal connection to animals and plants, rivers and hills, trees and clouds can be reawakened. It is a gesture of protest, calling us back to a life of connection and intimacy, of feeling and wonder. It is an invitation to feed the fires of our aliveness and coax us back to life. All this comes to us through the providence of grief.
Every one of us must undertake an apprenticeship with sorrow. We must learn the art and craft of grief, discover the profound ways it ripens and deepens us. While grief is an intense emotion, it is also a skill we develop through a prolonged walk with loss. Facing grief is hard work. It takes “the outrageous courage of the bodhi heart,” as Pema Chödrön calls it.6 It takes outrageous courage to face outrageous loss. This is precisely what we are being called to do. Any loss, whether deeply personal or one of those that swirl around us in the wider world, calls us to full-heartedness, for that is the meaning of courage. To honor our grief, to grant it space and time in our frantic world, is to fulfill a covenant with soul—to welcome all that is, thereby granting room for our most authentic life.
There is a good deal of evidence that supports our need to work with the difficult emotion of grief, which inevitably finds its way into our lives. An apprenticeship with sorrow offers us the chance to build our capacity to stay present when the intense feelings of grief arise. Through meaningful rituals, a community of friends, some time in benevolent solitude, and effective practices that help us stretch into our bigger selves, we are offered the opportunity to develop a living relationship with loss. We can recover a faith in grief that recognizes that grief is not here to take us hostage, but instead to reshape us in some fundamental way, to help us become our mature selves, capable of living in the creative tension between grief and gratitude. In so doing, our hearts are ripened and made available for the great work of loving our lives and this astonishing world. It is an act of soul activism.
Grief is essential to finding and maintaining a feeling of emotional intimacy with life, with one another, and with our own soul. May you find nourishment in these pages for your soul and for your commitment to stay connected to the source of life.
FRANCIS WELLER
Forestville, California
Russian River Watershed
One
An Apprenticeship with Sorrow
Grief dares us to love once more.
—TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
This is a book about grief, about its many moods and movements, shapes and textures. It is about how sorrow carves riverbeds in our soul, deepening us as it flows in and out of our lives. There is something familiar about the rising and falling of loss, how it takes us below the surface of our lives and works on us in some alchemical way. We are remade in times of grief, broken apart and reassembled. It is hard, painful, and unbidden work. No one goes in search of loss; rather, it finds us and reminds us of the temporary gift we have been given, these few sweet breaths we call life.
I’m not sure how or when I began my apprenticeship with sorrow. I do know that it was my gateway back into the breathing and animate world. It was through the dark waters of grief that I came to touch my unlived life, by at last unleashing tears I had never shed for the losses in my world. Grief led me back into a world that was vivid and radiant. There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief.
This book is also about restoring the Soul of the World.7 Bringing soul back to the world means perceiving the world through a deepened imagination, one that is capable of experiencing our intimacy with the surrounding world of finches and dragonflies, creeks and woodlands, neighborhoods and friends. Everything possesses soul. It is our myopia, our one-dimensional attention to things “human,” that leads us to see the world as an object, something to be controlled, manipulated, and consumed. The earth is a revelation, offering itself to us daily in an astonishing array of beauty and suffering. What is required of us is living with a level of openness and vulnerability to the joys and sorrows of the world. Taking in the beauty of the land as well as the great rips and tears in her skin requires a psyche attuned to the living world and one engaged in the ongoing conversation with all things. Soul returns to the world when we attend to the rhythms of nature, when we nourish our friendships with time and attention and in our daily participation with repairing the world. How well we do that will determine the fate of our communities and the planet.
For more than thirty years I have worked with individuals in my practice as a psychotherapist and in workshop settings. The one emotion that has touched everyone is grief. It may be the grief we finally allow ourselves to feel for the life we did not choose. It may be our sorrow for losses that happened early in our life, losses that we were unprepared to grieve. It may be for relationships that fell apart, friendships that have vanished, times of violation and abandonment, or for the suffering we feel for our ravished earth.
When the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and began spilling oil in the spring of 2010, we were confronted with a grief we could barely comprehend. The daily images of oil-soaked pelicans, turtles, dolphins, and other sea creatures crashed into our awareness in ways we could not deny. For months we watched as the oil gushed from the leak five thousand feet below the surface into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, onto the white, sandy beaches, and into the bayous—and we shared a common sorrow, a grief that washed into our souls. There was a feeling that something had been irrevocably changed by this event. The scientists reported that the spill effects might linger for years, perhaps changing the life of the Gulf forever. We looked on in shock and disbelief. Our hearts were broken.
I often woke in the middle of the night during that time, sensing the dying creatures and weeping for them. It was not something over there that was happening. It was here in my body, in my heart. It was as if a part of me was being devastated by the oil, suffocated and poisoned by the toxins as they spewed into the water. Whatever physical distance there was between me and the Gulf, it made no difference. I experienced it immediately in my soul, and I know this was true for many others as well.
It wasn’t long after the capping of the well on July 15 that our attention slowly drifted away from the Gulf. We were assured that everything was returning to normal and that the waters were fine and we would soon be able to eat the shrimp and fish again. We slowly slipped back into denial, away from the frightening truth that the oil was still there, plumes of oil deep beneath the surface, affecting the entire food chain, from plankton to whales. Television and radio coverage quickly dried up. Except for those living near the disaster—the animals, birds, sea life, and humans—our capacity for distraction soon outweighed our capacity for attention and grief. I was reminded of a line from the German poet Rilke, “I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief, so this massive darkness makes me small.”8 He wrote that line in 1904. Our knowledge of grief has not grown much since then, and consequently, this darkness makes us small.
How do we learn to carry our grief and not collapse or turn away in denial? How do we come to see grief as vital and necessary and not something only to be endured? To achieve this shift requires a re-visioning of grief, not as an event in our lives—a period of mourning—but as an ongoing conversation that accompanies us throughout life. Grief and loss are with us continually, shaping our walk through life, and in some real way, determining how fully we engage our lives. This shift in perspective invites us into a prolonged period of learning the ways and styles of grief. In essence, we are asked to take up an apprenticeship with sorrow.
An apprenticeship with sorrow leads us to the heart of loss. Soul invites us repeatedly to take up this endeavor and be reshaped by its multiple demands. An apprenticeship with sorrow requires a hands-on encounter in which we are invited to work with the materials of grief, its leaden weight, and the particular demands of melancholy. We can feel it already, just in these few sentences, that this apprenticeship leads us below ground, into the hallway of shadows and forgotten ancestors. Here we find the scattered shards of unattended grief, the pieces of unwept loss, and the shavings of old wounds swept into the corner.
An apprenticeship with sorrow invites us to learn the rites of grief and to practice a reverence of approach, as Irish poet/philosopher John O’Donohue suggests. He writes, “What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. . . . When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us.”9 How we approach our sorrows profoundly affects what comes to us in return. We often hold grief at a distance, hoping to avoid our entanglement with this challenging emotion. This leads to our feeling detached, disconnected, and cold. At other times, there is no space between us and the grief we are feeling. We are then swept up in the tidal surge of sorrow and often feel as though we are drowning. An approach of reverence offers us the chance to learn a more skillful pattern of relating with grief. When we come to our grief with reverence, we find ourselves in right relationship with sorrow, neither too far away nor too close. We have entered into an ongoing conversation with this difficult, holy visitor. Learning we can be with our grief, holding it softly and warmly, is the first task in our apprenticeship.
Approaching sorrow, however, requires enormous psychic strength. For us to tolerate the rigors of engaging the images, emotions, memories, and dreams that arise in times of grief, we need to fortify our interior ground. This is done through developing a practice that we sustain over time. Any form will do—writing, drawing, meditation, prayer, dance, or something else—as long as we continue to show up and maintain our effort. A practice offers ballast, something to help us hold steady in difficult times. This deepens our capacity to hold the vulnerable emotions surrounding loss without being overwhelmed by them. Grief work is not passive: it implies an ongoing practice of deepening, attending and listening. It is an act of devotion, rooted in love and compassion. (See the resources at the end of this book for more on developing the practice of compassion.)
