grief and healing

Earth Day Remembrance by Sara Wright

“It is the Whole Earth You Are”

I was on my knees awash in the kind of grief that only people who have been torn from the same skin can begin to comprehend.

I sprinkled most of the ashes lovingly in the shallow depression that I dug into half frozen ground. I had never felt so alone. Unknown to me, once a beloved companion, my little brother’s ashes had spent 32 years stuffed into a cardboard box in my parents’ attic. Every year since his death my nightmares intensified… he was left wandering in the dark with no place to rest.

Death By Drowning: A Poem Written the Day After The Supreme Court Overturned Roe v. Wade by Marcia W. Mount Shoop

Today at 10:06am
I found him
belly up
only a little bloated
water his deep
dark grave.

Turn the bucket
over
Talk gently
“How long have you been
in here, friend?”

Turn him over
his final rest
decomposing leaves,
Poison Ivy canopy
Sets off the blue

Mirroring Loss Part 2 by Elizabeth Ann Bartlett

Part 1 was posted yesterday.

As a society, we are not good at grief. Three days max, then we are expected to be back to work, keep the economy humming – shop, go to the movies and the mall, “put on a happy face.” Required to wear a cheery countenance, we deny our suffering and the suffering of others. However, loss unacknowledged compounds its effects. Grief will unleash itself somewhere, whether manifesting in excessive consumption – of food, alcohol, Netflix, stuff; or in unquelled anger, violence, hatred, enemy-making, and scapegoating — all of which have been erupting onto our world in devastating ways; or in the unmetabolized pain we pass on to the next generations. It is essential to our individual and collective well-being that we welcome grief, and tend it.

Mirroring Loss, Part 1 by Elizabeth Ann Bartlett

Strains of “In the Bleak Midwinter” have been accompanying me on my wintertime walks. Yet “bleak” is the last word I would use to describe these glorious winter days. The sparkling snow, dazzling sunshine, and deep blue of the sky against white birch branches offer solace to my soul. Still, the carol rings true, for in this midwinter, bleakness – a sense of desolation, loss, and despair — shrouds the land. Many dear to me have suffered tragic losses – of brothers, mothers, sisters, children, friends, partners and spouses – to cancer, suicide, alcohol, a hit-and-run driver, injury from a fall, dementia, sudden death, and sheer despair. An aggrieved world spins out tendrils of affiliated losses — of community and country, safety and security, watersheds and wild places, touch and tenderness and trust; family and faith — whether in god or humanity or the future. Thousands have lost the tangibles of jobs, shelter, savings, and physical capacity, and millions more the intangibles of dreams deferred, hopes for a nation, and belief in the basic decency of our fellow humans. And then there are the ordinary, everyday losses. As a friend recently posted, “I am grieving. I miss Sunday breakfasts at the cafe. Live music. Dinner parties. I miss seeing people smile in the grocery aisle.”[i] We are all suffering utter and ongoing loss.

Last Tuesday Night by Marcia Mount Shoop

It’s been just over a week. Last Tuesday night to be exact. That’s the night the four of us huddled around our beloved companion of sixteen and a half years and said goodbye.

Buck became a part of our family when he was three months old. We were living in Oakland, California at the time. My son was five and my daughter had just turned one. My husband was coaching for the Raiders and he was gone all the time. It wasn’t a great time to get a puppy on paper—but our hearts said otherwise, so we did.

Just a little over a year earlier I had said goodbye to Tino. He’s the Blue Heeler that found me in a dream when I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That morning I woke up and just had to get a puppy. It was a visceral pull. And I went to the Santa Fe Human Society and there was the puppy from my dream. He didn’t look like any dog I had ever seen until my dream the night before.

Spinning the Fire, Shifting the Current by Chris Ash

Christy at the beach Seventy-two hours out of every week, I carry a hotline phone. While calls come in waves and some shifts are silent, my everyday and professional lives are peppered with reminders that evil doesn’t just pierce reality through acts of power, control, and violence – it seeps through in discrediting voices and disbelieving questions. It rolls into us off the well-meaning tongues of community members who’d rather protect the status quo than hold people accountable. It wraps its tendrils around us as we walk through each system we are forced to navigate – systems that are not set up to protect our vulnerable hearts and human dignity. Evil powers the backlash wave that tries to knock down every survivor who speaks out about gender, sexual, or intimate partner violence, and it also is in the fear we swallow when we choke down our own stories, press them down deeper, grasping to avoid yet another assault on our integrity, intelligence, and truth.

Evil stains our flags with the undeniable imprints of genocide, slavery, and continuing racial injustice and then demands that we wave those flags, smiling and allegiant, as The American Dream itself is held hostage, torn from its family, held in a cage. Continue reading “Spinning the Fire, Shifting the Current by Chris Ash”

Grief and Healing by Carol P. Christ

My father died on July 6, 2017, 98 years, 4 months, 12 days. The last time I saw him was in the spring of 2004. During that visit, he gave me “the silent treatment” (refused to look at me or speak to me) when I stepped over an invisible line. That was not the first time, but it would be the last. When I gave lectures in California in 2008 and 2010, I agonized and yet made the decision not to visit him. I did not want to give him the chance to hurt me again.

My father and I kept in touch at Christmas and birthdays. In recent years we found our mutual interest in the family genealogy to be safe ground on which we could make contact. I was pleased to be able to tell him that I found the place of origin of our branch of the Christ family in Unterpreppach, Lower Bavaria when I visited Germany in the spring of 2016 with my cousin Bill. My father was with me in spirit when I visited the Christ family graves at Most Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Cemetery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the winter of 2016.

When my father had his first heart attack a few years ago, I agonized again and made the decision not to visit. I did not want to give him the chance to hurt me again. This time the decision was final. Continue reading “Grief and Healing by Carol P. Christ”

What is the Nature of the Hope that Can Trump Despair in the New Year? by Carol P. Christ

“All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” These words posted on the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno have an eerie resonance in our time.

Marie Cartier recently posted a blog on children and hunger with facts so devastating I could not finish reading it. Earlier in the month Jassy Watson wrote about her deep feelings of grief on hearing Luisah Teish’s “Prayer for Disappearing Species.” Grief, despair, and sadness about the injustices in our world can be overwhelming.

A friend of mine has recently fallen into a deep depression. When I try to talk her out of it, she repeats that they are threatening to cut down the last remaining old growth forest in her home state of Oregon and that she can no longer eat fish because radioactivity released in the Fukishima nuclear plant disaster is reaching the seacoast of Oregon.

When I tell my friend she should not dwell only on these things and that she must remember that the world is still a beautiful place, she responds, “I do not want to give up my feelings. I know I must find a way to acknowledge my sadness and make a place for joy, but I don’t know how to do it.”

I have been in the grip of deep grief about the planet myself, not once but many times. But this happens less frequently than it used to. When I think about the differences between how I once felt and how I feel now, I think the difference is that I have come to terms with and accepted the likelihood that “the world as we know it” is “going to hell in a handbasket”—as I put it.

I believe that the most likely conclusion of the choices human beings are making on planet earth today is massive environmental destruction leading to great suffering and probable extinction for human and many other species on planet earth. This is what I believe, but I also remind myself that I cannot know for sure. The earth and its species including human beings may have resources of resistance and survival, transformation and adaptation,that I do not know about and cannot imagine.

When I began to accept that the world I know and love (where spring follows winter, where birds sing, and where there is hope that injustice can be rectified) may not exist in the very near future, I had an astonishing insight. The death of the world I know and love will not mean the death of our planet or the end of the evolution of the universe.

Thinking about the disappearance of species and the death of human beings from starvation often feels too much to bear. None of this should be happening. Still, it can be strangely comforting to remind myself that the world I love is not the only possible world. There have been other worlds on this very planet—the time when the first cells were formed, the time of the dinosaurs, and many others. Evolution will continue on planet earth for several billion more years, and when our sun burns out, other suns will most likely still be shining in the universe.

This insight was followed by another. The reason for hope is not the conviction that we will be able to save the world we love. The reason for hope—and the reason to keep trying to save our world—is the deep knowing that it is right to try. Even if we cannot save the world we love for all time, we can savor the gift of life, and we can continue to try to create a world in which the gift of life is shared widely today and tomorrow.

I have written many times that we must learn to love a life that ends in death. I was speaking about accepting that each one of us will surely die. I do not fear death. Overcoming this fear has opened me to a greater and more clear-sighted love for life.

Can we learn to love life while accepting that the world we love may be dying? Can we continue to work to improve the conditions of life for individuals and species knowing that the world as we love it may not survive? Do we have any other choice?

For me the hope that can trump despair in our time begins in gratitude for a life that has been given to us, a life that has come down to us through the generations, and through billions of years of the evolutionary process on our planet.

Let us bless the Source of Life.

Let us bless the Source of Life, and the cycles of birth, death, and regeneration.

Let us turn back from despair.

Let us embrace the gift of life and share it with as many others as possible in the new year.

Carol P. Christ learned to be grateful for the gift of life in Crete on the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete she leads through Ariadne Institute. It is not too early to sign up for the spring or fall pilgrimages for 2014. Carol can be heard on a WATER Teleconference. Carol’s books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely-used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions. She wishes you great joy in the new year.