This will be the start of what I intend to be several posts which I will be sharing out of Francis Weller's "The Wild Edge of Sorrow." While it is true that I am consciously grieving now as I witness my mother's gradual but deepening journey towards death, it is also true that I am drawn to share these excerpts for a much larger reason. It is my belief that our culture's relationship with grief is a deeply distorted and unhealthy one, and that the cost of this to us as individuals and to all of our relationships — within our intimate relationships, within our families and communities, within our politics and society and nation, with the Earth and with other beings, and within the stories we believe and the values we practice and don't practice — is enormous. We are being asked to open our hearts. I share this heartfelt and soulful wisdom out of my deep desire to be among those who are acting as midwives to the evolution of our hearts and souls as human beings and as planetary sisters and brothers. May we all be beckons of light, embodying the many hopeful signs for our planet. With deep blessings — Molly
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. 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 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....
Today 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 unfolding our world and our lives. This crack in our denial is one of the most hopeful signs 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 up to a larger 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.
— Francis Weller
Excerpted from the Preface of
The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals and
the Sacred Work of Grief
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