Grieving with and through the Present Moment

in a Time of Collapsing Systems

I have been sitting at my desk daily, knowing that sitting is not so good for this body (it’s not so good for most aging bodies, or maybe all bodies), but I must write, otherwise, I will be mentally unwell, on top of being physically challenged. I will get down on my mat in a few minutes and do some of the PT stretches I was taught. It seems that I’ve not had the right posture for a very long time, and I arrogantly thought my posture was great given all the yoga I’ve done over the years (off & on, since I was 15). Oh, well, the body keeps teaching humility, as do the healers in my life, and I am doing my best to listen. They have repeatedly told me that “sitting is the new smoking,” and after 5 years of too much sitting (yes, I blame COVID and a life lived on Zoom screens when I was not walking, dancing, meditating, doing chores, yoga, caregiving, or gardening), I am finally starting a new chapter with a standing desk. I’m now on the third day of testing whether my writing muses feel welcome when words flow from a more vertical position.

I look out at the garden, listen to the birds, and make a deliberate effort to avoid looking over at my old work station, an insanely cluttered desk. I make a mental note to attend to that desk and its overflow of process soon. I am learning not to frame this disorder as something negative - it’s just part of the process.

Sun dapples on the lush green of leaves, magnolia, apple, lemon balm, and red mustard greens, while hummingbirds dive towards the flowering kale, hoping to find some nourishment. Other small birds whose names I don’t know, but who delight me all the same, seem to be playing hide and seek in the grape vines and overgrown hops. This meditation on breathing in the essences of plant and animal kin is sometimes the only thing to ground me.

There was a moment during the grief ritual ten days ago when six of us went into a spontaneous huddle with our ancestors, dancing, chanting, laughing, and holding onto each other, most of our cheeks wet with tears. We had arrived at the retreat enraged and sorrowful about the brutal genocide, with the current forced famine, continuing displacement, and bombing of innocents, all of us anti-Zionist Jews. We had cried, beaten cushions on the floor, stomped on the ground, screaming our rage at the horrors being perpetuated in our name. After the yelling had subsided, some of us went still, not paralyzed, and looked out at the mountains and the water, and whispered a prayer: “enough.” Enough of the bombing, enough of the brutality, enough of the dehumanizing destruction of all that is sacred - life.

Sitting in the grief portal that continues to open inside of me, shifting from one point of pain to another, I try to remember the precious details of my time sitting in circle with “the sudden village” of that weekend. When I returned from two nights of ritual in community (the sudden village), I wanted to write about it right away, but the process of sifting through the bits has taken over a week. It seems like the digestion of that experience and the time we are living through has required a major recalibration of every cell in my body.

Before driving the hour to the banks of the Hood Canal, I glimpsed at the website of the retreat center. I was startled and grateful to see that I was going to such a lovely place to grieve. Once I arrived, I realized that the photos on their website didn’t prepare me for how transcendent the setting was. The insidious fangs of fascism seemed to loosen as I gazed out at the gentle, flowing blue of the waters below us; the snow covered Olympics took my breath away. I walked down steep paths framed with flower beds to the welcoming, wood-framed St.Andrews House and was warmly greeted by the facilitators. I was assigned to a bedroom that was spartan, but adequate for two people in single beds. Very artful, handmade quilts were on each bed. I arrived before my roommate, and set up my corner of the space in a way that functioned well enough. When she arrived, we smiled and greeted each other, but barely shared any details about our lives, other than our geographical locations. We laughed when we saw that we had chosen the same starry-patterned pillowcases from the linen closet. I respected her reserve as she did for me. I remember thinking in passing that I have certainly shifted the way I engage with new people. In the past, I might have been much more outgoing or in a people-pleasing mode. But I was feeling private, and I didn’t want to alter that feeling. Thankfully, what remains of my people-pleasing behaviors, finally understood as a response to the insults of patriarchy and other traumas, are in the process of being composted.

I went downstairs to meet others who arrived and discovered that three of the participants I knew from other contexts. Two had attended the grief retreat with me in the fall, and I was glad to see them again. The third had been part of my meditation sangha in Seattle pre-COVID, and then briefly on Zoom in that first year of lockdown. She’d never been to a grief retreat before so she was a bit anxious, but also excited. She wasn’t sure where she knew me from, at first, especially because others had greeted me as “Bee.” She knew me as Beverly, so I was glad to reintroduce myself to her and explain the changes that I had gone through since I last saw her.

I can barely remember the opening circle now, but I recall that people shared their names, pronouns, where they hailed from, and were asked to share word or two about the feelings that they were carrying. My words were open and curious, but behind those words was a a complexity of emotions that I wasn’t yet ready to communicate or couldn’t yet articulate even though I felt quite safe at this gathering. How does one share the depths of despair one feels about some deranged humans creating such misery for a whole population, delivering it with daily brutality? And how does unveil the fears one has about the future of our children? It is too much, it is ineffable (a word I couldn’t remember at first, but one of the words that was gifted to me by my precocious young son two decades ago).

As the talking stone moved around the circle, each of the 27 participants shared their rage, exhaustion, anxiety, bringing tears and resonant voices into the beautifully crafted lounge, framed by ancient log beams and wooden panels harvested in the region. Some of us were certainly grieving the mindless extraction of forests in the area, but we were sitting in the paradox of enjoying the beauty of retreat center, the knowledge of our settler privilege, and all the harm that sat within those things. A stew of other concerns arrived in that opening gathering. The facilitators shared poetry that explored the depth of what we were anticipating and invited us to join our voices in songs and to move and lift our energy for dinner. It was a very social meal. We all seemed very interested in learning who our companions were for this deep dive into our feelings.

Gatherings to grieve seem to have become more common in the Pacific NW in the 22 years that I’ve lived in this region. I did my first one over a decade ago with Sobonfu Some, the ex-wife of Malidoma Some. As I mentioned in my last Substack, both of them had been sent to the “West” by the elders of the Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso. This true act of sacrifice (leaving the security of their homes) was to help us recover from the violence emerging from our inability to grieve as communities. My retreat with Sobonfu raised a lot of questions for me. Why was it so hard for me to cry? Had I corked up my tear ducts in order to be safe in the world? After all, I was often mocked by my family for being “overly sensitive,” so at some point I had learned to harden those physical sensations and transform them into poems, marks on a page, vocal expressions, and dance moves. All forms of art became my refuge. But now, in my elder years, I needed to figure out how to open to my body’s truth in the most obvious ways. It’s not that I have stopped crying altogether, but it is not easy for me…and I’ve discovered that this is a similar challenge for several of the strongest of my women friends. Have we shut down that response in an effort to appear less vulnerable? Have we capitulated to Capitalism’s mandate to be machine-like? It is quandary for me.

Hence, I chose to go to a grief retreat on Vashon last October AND I came to work on this challenge (among others) along the banks of the Hood Canal earlier this month.

We had the same facilitators as the Vashon retreat last fall: Peter Jabin, Christina Manzoni, and Reve Shannon, and they did a fine job. They repeated several times to the participants that there was no “right way” to grieve. Being accepted for my lack of tears was crucial to my presence there. I was good making all kinds of sound, trembling with emotion, and pounding the cushions on the floor, but wet eyes happened only briefly when I tuned into the tears of others.

We had many writing exercises, some based on prompts offered by Natalie Goldberg’s “Writing Down the Bones.” We were able to choose between three prompts, write for 10 minutes, and then share what we wrote with two other members of our group. The instructions were to listen carefully to the person who is reading their prompt response and when they concluded to say nothing more than “thank you.” It was suggested that you don’t discuss the content of what the person shared at a later time, unless the author specifically asks for feedback, but even that is discouraged, as is advice-giving. This is a discipline, and also a ritual in itself. The automatic writing that emerged in my journal took me to many crevices within my psyche, glimpses into bits of trauma and loss, as well as places of resilience.

That afternoon we got ready to gather our altar bundles.We were asked to take a silent walk on the land and to carefully and respectfully choose bits of nature’s debris to tie together with our intentions around our grief, and place them on the altar. The bundles were each unique and sacred in their own way. We were told not to photograph the altar that we had built to honor its sacred nature, but I think it’s not taboo to share the photo of my unfinished bundle below. After more story sharing, laughter, nodding heads, and our dinner, we were ready for the evening’s ceremony to begin.

We were greeted by the facilitators who explained the structure of the evening. We were all trained in the chant that we would continually sing as grievers approached the altar. There were drummers moving the energy in the space and our bodies began to move with that rhythm. Each griever went to the altar with a witness, either chosen or self-nominated, and could ask for the witness to hold or touch them or not. There was space for five people to kneel, sit, or lie down in front of the altar on cushions. There were chairs on either side for two folks who needed that kind of support. When each griever returned through a “gate” made of cedar fronds and candles delicately delineating the floor, they were greeted with huge smiles, welcoming phrases of “thank you, we are grateful you are here, thank you for your courage, etc.” and hugged, if touch was welcomed. Many faces were wet with tears, and expressions ranged from elation to wonderment, and after a gulp of water or a pause in reflection, grievers became part of the village again, chanting and dancing.

We were again advised before the ceremony that there was no right way to be in the space, but if we felt overwhelmed, it was important to let a facilitator know. It felt comforting to step into the chanting, dancing, and drumming, our version of the “sudden village” - it was my third experience of this Dagara tradition so there was little awkwardness. I approached the altar at least four times during the evening, each time with a different witness and different need. I recall screaming my pain and grief during one particularly intense stretch at the altar. Sounds came out of my body that I had never heard before, and I knew that they were welcome as an offering to the ancestors, to the immensity of what we face as a species as our humanity is tested in these horrific times. I was grateful for the witnesses who embraced me during and after my time at the altar, and I was honored to be a witness. I felt no embarrassment when I returned to “the village” and was greeted more warmly than any other time. I recognized again that tears, silence, groaning, wailing, prayer, keening, and furious screams were all part of what needed to be placed at the altar and each sound, prayer, and gesture was offered as a gift to the collective.

A tiny part of my activist self wanted to tear this process apart, and whispered snidely, “what fucking use is this ritual?” I respectfully heard her, and said, also in whisper, “we have no idea in this moment what medicine is needed to reduce the harm that is happening in this time. Ritual may have more power than, you, the activist knows.”

The following day, we reflected on the experience in our closing circle and Peter talked about the self-critical voices that can emerge post-ritual or post-sharing of vulnerable feelings. He very humbly shared his own. There were many nodding heads in the room. As the talking stone moved through the circle, my roommate shared a reflection about the impact of modernity on our lives, and recommended that we all read Hospicing Modernity. I was delighted and a bit dumbfounded to hear that I’d been sharing space with a fellow reader of Vanessa Andreotti’s book. As we packed up to leave our room later, I learned that she had also studied with Bayo Akomolafe in his program, We Will Dance with Mountains. She told me that she worked as a therapist, and I complimented her for having really good boundaries. She said she was working on them. I laughed. When she complained to me that she has no one in Portland who is doing this kind of work, I was a bit miffed with myself for being so intent on honoring privacy in our small shared space, but I also realized that if we had stayed up chatting with each other excitedly that we would not have been so present for the group process. We just received the contact list, so I will reach out to her.

Before leaving the retreat, we burned our altar bundles, and shared many hugs with each other. The “sudden village” is a very abbreviated version of what true community could be, and in this time in the world, I find myself imagining with as much as hope as I can conjure up that our descendants find their way back into villages, with all their richness and messiness. Perhaps if the knowledge about working through conflict, respecting and relishing differences, and using ritual to process deep emotions, is handed down to future generations, there is a way that humanity can evolve into something more in harmony with the natural world. All bets are off.

Before leaving the retreat center, I took a brief stroll through the grounds and well-tended gardens, paused within the labyrinths, and hiked up a trail into the woods. I felt refreshed and lighter, but I knew that lots of hidden layers would be revealed in the coming days. The disorientation of that first week back made it difficult to digest so many things, both literally and figuratively, but I’m trusting in the process as best I can.

More soon…I’m trusting in slowness and the wisdom of trees.

In Sophie Strand’s memoir, “The Body is a Doorway,” she quotes John Holloway, sociologist, “the scream is a rejection of a world that we feel to be wrong, negation of a world we feel to be negative.” Holloway says, “In the beginning is the scream. We scream. When we write or when we read, it is easy to forget that the beginning is not the word, but the scream. Faced with the mutilation of human lives by capitalism, a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, a scream of anger, a scream of refusal: NO. The starting point of theoretical reflection is opposition, negativity, struggle. It is from rage that thought is born, not from the pose of reason, not from the reasoned-sitting-back-and-reflecting-on-the-mysteries-of-existence that is the conventional image of “the thinker.” We start from negation, from dissonance. The dissonance can take many shapes. An inarticulate mumble of discontent, tears of frustration, a scream of rage, a confident roar. An unease, a confusion, a longing, a critical vibration.”

Please take these words about grief and anger and dance with them as best you can. If dancing is not your jam, find a tree to sit under or a body of water to gaze at, and fill your heart with these free things that can ease the pain of this time.