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  The Wild Edge of Sorrow

  The Wild Edge of Sorrow

  Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

  FRANCIS WELLER

  Foreword by MICHAEL LERNER

  North Atlantic Books

  Berkeley, California

  Copyright © 2015 by Francis Weller. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

  Published by

  North Atlantic Books

  Berkeley, California

  Cover photo © Boyan Dimitrov/Shutterstock.com

  Cover design by Suzanne Albertson

  Permissions begin on page 183

  The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

  North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weller, Francis, 1956-

  The wild edge of sorrow : rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief / Francis Weller ; foreword by Michael Lerner

  pages cm

  Summary: “Through story, poetry, and insightful reflections, reveals how ritual, community, and the sacred restore the original context of grief.”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-58394-976-4 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-58394-975-7 (e-book)

  1. Grief. 2. Rites and ceremonies. 3. Mourning customs. 4. Spiritual life. I. Title.

  BJ1487.W46 2015

  155.9’37—dc23

  2015002333

  For Joy Parker, dear friend, gifted guide of language, woman of lace.

  And for my grandson, Luca. May you know a future brimming with beauty.

  Sorrow is part of the earth’s great cycles, flowing into the night like cool air sinking down a river course. To feel sorrow is to float on the pulse of the earth, the surge from living to dying, from coming into being to ceasing to exist. Maybe this is why the earth has the power over time to wash sorrow into a deeper pool, cold and shadowed. And maybe this is why, even though sorrow never disappears, it can make a deeper connection to the currents of life and so connect, somehow, to sources of wonder and solace.

  —KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to acknowledge all those with whom I have had the honor of sharing time in my practice and the many workshops that I have led over the years. You have taught me much of what I understand of grief and how we are able to heal from the accumulated sorrows of a lifetime.

  To my dear friends, whose faithfulness and trust in me have encouraged me to persevere in this effort: Richard Palmer, Judith Tripp, Michelle Keip, Larry Robinson, Doug von Koss, Richard Naegle, Kim Scanlon, Patrick Mullin, Bob Hynes, and John Meserve. Your friendship is priceless.

  To my brothers and sisters in the Blue Raven Village: Sashana, David, Kim, Bob, John, Fiona, Zack, Diane, Judith, Wayne, John, Jeannie, Travis, and Oliver. Thank you for your constant love and support.

  To my mentors: Robert Stein, MD, a true doctor of the soul, Clarke Berry, for your soft and benevolent wisdom, and Larry Spiro, for your keen insight and devotion to the practice of soul-work. You taught me how to sit with others in a soulful way. I am forever grateful. I miss you all.

  To Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker, for bringing my work to the attention of Doug Reil and Tim McKee at North Atlantic Books. To Vanessa Ta and Jennifer Eastman, for your careful editing and for preserving the spirit of the work.

  To those whose lives have helped to shape my own: Carl Jung, James Hillman, Paul Shepard, Malidoma Somé, Thomas Berry, Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams, Chellis Glendinning, Michael Meade, Joseph Campbell, Martín Prechtel, Thomas Moore, Derrick Jensen, Robert Bly, Kathleen Dean Moore, David Abram, and all the others who have shown me the ways to live a life of meaning.

  To the poets of all time whose words speak the truths of the soul. You have kept the imagination alive during a time when we most need it.

  To indigenous cultures everywhere and your fierce protection of your ways and your lands. You help us remember what it means to be human.

  To the Russian River Watershed, whose beauty and abundance fills me every day. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  To my son, Christopher. You are a constant source of surprise. May you continue to bring your beauty into the world.

  To Victor, who holds so many. May you carry on your grandfather’s heart.

  And finally, my gratitude to my wife, Judith, for your steadfast support of this work and my soul. Through you I entered a world that sings.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Preface

  One: An Apprenticeship with Sorrow

  Two: To and from the Soul’s Hall

  Three: The Five Gates of Grief

  Four: Stories of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal

  Five: Silence and Solitude: The House of Our Aloneness

  Six: Pushing through Solid Rock

  Seven: Drinking the Tears of the World

  Eight: Entering the Healing Ground: The Sacred Work of Grief

  Nine: Becoming Ancestors

  Resources

  Some Thoughts on Practice

  The Generous Heart: The Gift of Self-Compassion

  A Loving Kindness Meditation

  Freedom and Choice: Working with the Complex

  Rituals for You and Your Community

  Resources for Working with Grief

  Notes

  Permissions

  Index

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  Michael Lerner is president and founder of Commonweal in Bolinas, California. Founded in 1976, Commonweal has programs in health and healing, education and the arts, and the environment and justice. Lerner is cofounder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and The New School at Commonweal.

  “Survive love and loss,” the great French essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne advised. His maxim for life compresses the essence of the human dilemma into four words.

  Easier said than done, for loss is the other side of the coin of love. The greater the love, the greater the loss. And yet different people respond to loss very differently. When it comes to loss, there are hard-earned skills that can help you survive the unknown terrain in which you find yourself. There are survival skills, there are maps, and there are guides.

  Francis Weller is a well-travelled guide to the country of loss. He can teach you the survival skills. He can show you the maps. He carries his knowing of sorrow in his bones. He writes as someone who has been unmade in the way loss unmakes us.

  He is not afraid to tell us so.

  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. . . . 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.

  Weller coleads weeklong retreats with me in the Commonweal Cancer Help Program. We sit together many evenings in these retreats and hear stories of love and loss.

  We know that listening and honoring these stories makes a difference. He also leads his own retreats on grief and loss. I know some of those who have attended his retreats. I know from their accounts that these retreats too make a difference.

  The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief brings together Weller’s wisdom from decades of work with grief and loss.

  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 outrageous courage to face outrageous loss. This is precisely what we are being called to do.

  One of Weller’s most original contributions is his delineation of the five “gates of grief.” This will be my focus in the following few pages.

  The first gate he simply describes as everything we love, we will lose. The book is rich in discerning quotations, and here he quotes a twelfth-century poem:

  ‘Tis a fearful thing

  To love

  What death can touch.

  To love, to hope, to dream,

  And oh, to lose.

  A thing for fools, this,

  Love,

  But a holy thing

  To love what death can touch.

  This first gate is known to us all. The second gate surprises us: the places that have not known love. This is, to my mind, original and important. Weller writes:

  These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our lives. . . . T
hese neglected pieces of soul live in utter despair. . . . The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth.

  The third gate of grief is the sorrows of the world. This gate is more familiar. In the Cancer Help Program, we ask on our entry form to list major losses before a cancer diagnosis. A surprising number of people list grief at what is happening in the world as a grief they have long lived with. And, indeed, grief at the suffering of the world has long been known as a fundamental human dilemma. Suffering exists is the first noble truth of the Buddha. How to face suffering is at the heart of the great religious and philosophical traditions.

  “The cumulative grief of the world is overwhelming. . . . How can we possibly stay open to the endless assaults on the biosphere?” Weller asks. He then quotes Naomi Nye’s beautiful lines:

  Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

  you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

  You must wake up with sorrow.

  You must speak it till your voice

  catches the thread of all sorrows

  and you see the size of the cloth.

  Weller’s fourth gate is what we expected and did not receive.

  Again, this is, to me, an original observation. “Deep in our bones lies an old intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community. . . . In a sense, it is a form of spiritual employment. . . . Hidden within the losses at this gate lies our diminished experience of who we truly are.”

  Weller calls the fifth gate ancestral grief. “This is the grief we carry in our bodies from sorrows experienced by our ancestors. . . . Tending this undigested grief of our ancestors not only frees us to live our own lives but also eases ancestral suffering in the other world.”

  These gates offer us a way of acknowledging the many ways sorrow enters our lives. In this way, we are able to honor and heal the inevitable times of loss we each will face. Weller’s gift lies in bringing soul and community to places that are often met with denial or fear. This helps free us from facing our loss in isolation. The Cancer Help Program is founded on this deep truth: we heal in community.

  Wherever you find yourself on the path of sorrow, Weller will be a worthy companion. For the simple truth is that great loss is wasted if we do not use it, over time, to discover what lies beyond great loss. For this, Weller quotes the great naturalist and essayist Terry Tempest Williams:

  Grief dares us to love once more.

  PREFACE

  Grief and loss touch us all. When we gather in community for a grief ritual, the many tributaries of sorrow flow into the room. They swirl around us, touching everyone in the circle. We listen as the faces of loss are named: the death of a partner, a child, a marriage; the suicide of a parent or sibling; cancer and its rapacious consumption of life; a home lost through foreclosure; broken childhoods filled with alcoholism, violence, and neglect; the lingering scars of those who fought in wars; chronic illnesses that depress and debilitate; lives lost to addiction; and a prevailing sorrow for our struggling world. As we come to the end of the sharing, there is a dawning recognition that this is our shared sorrow, the communal cup from which we all drink. It is ours to hold and to gradually empty. We do this together as we enter the healing ground.

  For most of our time as a species, the primary association with grief has come through the death of someone we loved. Every culture has crafted rituals to attend to the wild mystery of death and the rainfall of sorrow that accompanies the disappearance of the beloved. Today, however, the sources of loss are multiple, and the complexity of addressing this tangled web of grief can, at times, feel overwhelming. These losses tumble into our lives continually. We sense the presence of loss from places both personal and communal, intimate and shared. What I have come to see is that much of the grief we carry is not personal; it doesn’t arise from our histories or experiences. Rather, it circulates around us, coming to us from a wider expanse, arriving on unseen currents that touch our souls. These Gates of Grief reveal the interpenetrating reality of our time: we are not isolated cells partitioned off from other cells; we have semipermeable membranes that make possible an ongoing exchange with the great body of life. We register in our psyches, consciously or not, the fact of our shared sorrows. Learning to welcome, hold, and metabolize these sorrows is the work of a lifetime and the focus of this book.

  Sorrow helps us remember something long intuited by indigenous people across the planet: our lives are intricately comingled with one another, with animals, plants, watersheds, and soil. For the last several centuries, we have envisioned a split between our inner lives and the surrounding world. Psyche, however, is not confined to the deep interior of our lives; it overlaps with the wider world and perhaps, in these times, is most evident in the sorrows and suffering of the earth itself.1 Our personal experiences of loss and suffering are now bound inextricably with dying coral reefs, melting polar caps, the silencing of languages, the collapse of democracy, and the fading of civilization. The personal and the planetary are inseparable, as is our healing. Loss binds us together in a potent alchemy, confirming the heart’s intimacy with all things. Losing someone or something we love brings us into the shelter of our mutual grief. Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close. Alone and together, death and loss affect us all.

  Much has changed since I began leading grief rituals in 1997. At that time, people often expressed a reluctance to gather and share their grief. I had to gently convince people of the value of coming together in a village setting to tend our sorrows. Today, however, the great rips and tears in the fabric of culture, the cascading crisis of ecological breakdowns, and the loss of our certainty in the continuation of life itself have begun to break through our collective denial. The accumulation of losses are pressing on our psyches and demanding that we engage the multiple sorrows that are enfolding our world and our lives. This crack in our denial is one of the most hopeful signs I see for our planet. We are beginning to take in the wider expanse of loss that is happening in our culture and our ecosystems. In addition to our personal wounds and losses, we are hearing the earth itself calling for our attention and affection, our care and action. Her sorrows are being felt in our bodies; we sense them in our minds and glimpse them in our dreams. The interweaving of personal and planetary losses has left many of us feeling uncertain, anxious, and ultimately heartbroken.

  Our broken hearts have the potential to open us to a wider sense of identity, one capable of seeing through the partitions that have segregated self from world. Through grief, we are initiated into a more inclusive conversation between our singular lives and the soul of the world. We are coming to understand that there is no isolated self stranded in the cosmos; we are participants in an entwined and entangled net of connections with a continuous exchange of light, air, gravity, thought, color, and sound, all coalescing in the elegant dance that is our shared life. It is the broken heart that can let slip into its core the shimmer of a salmon gliding just under the surface of the water, the startling arc of the swift, the wonder of Mozart, and the sheer beauty of sunrise.

  We live, however, in a grief-phobic and death-denying society. Consequently, grief and death have been relegated to what psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow. The shadow is the repository of all the repressed and denied aspects of our lives. We send into the shadow the parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable to ourselves or to others, hoping to disown them. Doing this, we feel we may be spared the discomfort of having to face what has been declared unwelcome. Cultures also send aspects of psychic life into the shadow. Our refusal to acknowledge grief and death has twisted us into a culture riddled with death. One of Jung’s more chilling observations was that whatever we put into the shadow doesn’t sit there passively waiting to be reclaimed and redeemed; it regresses and becomes more primitive. Consequently, death rattles through our streets daily, in school shootings, suicides, murders, overdoses, gang violence, or through the sanctioned sacrifice of war dead. Needless to say, many of us limp through our lives, carrying the scars of our death-dealing society. Unfortunately, the fingers of death extend far beyond the streets of our cities. Hillsides are stripped of trees, leaving homeless the countless others who once dwelled within canopies, along creek beds, and in the underbrush. Mountains are destroyed for coal or copper. Oceans are mined and emptied of fish. Creatures who dwell underground in direct conversation with the living earth through their teeth, claws, and bellies are bulldozed away for malls or subdivisions. Death pervades our culture, becoming a presence we cannot contain or ultimately honor. We export our machinery of death to other lands through armadas of weapons, chemicals that poison watersheds, and in our support of tyrannical governments. Many more are caught in the rapacious appetites of corporate profiteers as they loot and plunder indigenous lands for oil and precious commodities, all with our tacit agreement and our denial intact.