Night Work
Grief takes us below the surface of our ordinary lives, dropping us into a world the color of a raven's wings. It is the night world, an encompassing surround of darkness and mystery. Our first association with this landscape often involve fear and resistance. Yet, every one of us alive today will face innumerable losses, both great and small, and we all take this journey downward into the belly of the Earth. This is a sacred terrain filled with memories, the artifacts of a lifetime, ancestors, and spirits. Grief pulls us into the underworld, where wee are invited to discover a new mode of seeing, one that reveals the holiness of all things.
The journey to the underworld may last months or years. In the midst of this darkness, we come to realize that "everything has to do with loving or not loving," as the poet Rumi reminds us. This teaching is fierce. It asks us to step fully into a conversation with things that happen in the night, in the dark hours of our lives. Some maturation occurs here, some cooking of the soul that requires these precise conditions. We pick up the orphaned and abandoned pieces of soul life and realize that they, too, are worthy of love.
What is the work we are asked to do in the night world? Whether we are facing the loss of someone we love, wounds suffered in our childhood, the rips and tears experienced by the Earth and her creatures, or our own eventual death, we are required to work with several essential things : to die before we die, to befriend the darkness, and to learn to let go. These practices ripen our grief into something that can, in turn, nourish our lives and the community.
To Die Before We Die
In his Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke wrote, "Be ahead of all parting, as it it had already happened. He encourages us to bring loss and death into the midst of our lives.By keeping our vulnerability and mortality close, we learn to meet each moment with presence, even as we know tit is passing away. In hte night world, we re invited into a conversation with death in which we are asked to look directly at the ways we are living. Are we fostering vitality, participation, intimacy — those qualities that matter to soul — or are we turning away and attempting to keep ourselves immune to the ways that life can touch and change us?
We face many little deaths in our lifetime — a friendship ends, a business venture folds, or the inevitable changes we encounter in our aging body. What is key is how we choose to respond to them. Sometimes our choices reinforce a small life. At other times, by letting an old pattern die, we enter into a larger encounter with being alive. This ongoing ritual of shedding outworn skins, of being remade time and again, is an ancient understanding most notably witnessed in the work of initiation. Every initiation brings one to the precipice of death. In fact, there is no genuine experience of initiation without an encounter with death. We are required to die to the old image of who we thought we were and step across the threshold into a radically altered sense of self. Loss and grief are an initiation into a changed landscape, reminding us that everything is passing. By dying before we die, we are able to accept this fact and embrace this amazing chance we have to be alive.
There is a proverb from Africa that says, "When death finds you, make sure it finds you alive." I love this adage, a wise reminder that death is always present and that when it come, it is best to meet it fully alive. As I wrote earlier, too many of us suffer from premature death, never fully embracing our lives and being open to the beauty and terror of existence. This is a result, in great part, of our refusal to accept life on life's terms. Instead, we try to avoid pain and suffering. We don't turn our face into the world, into the full experience of life, but instaed we slowly back into the grave, stubbornly trying ot avoid our losses, ignoring the truth that these sorrows can be our greatest teachers, our greatest gifts. This half-life is not what we came here to experience. To change this story, we must be able to bring death close to us. We must be willing to live with the ways that death keeps us — paradoxically — aware of whether or not we are fully embracing our lives.
To die before we die means that we must become radically honest with ourselves. We must shed the skins that do not foster our aliveness. One man, while participating in the first weekend of the Mean of Spirit initiation, suddenly realized how conscripted and narrow his life was. At that moment, he jumped out of his chair and flung it across the room in disgust. He clearly saw that he had unwittingly made an agreement to live small and to consistently tell himself what a good life he was living. This realization broke him open to the great well of grief he was carrying in his heart from all the times he had abandoned himself for the sake of fitting in and getting approval.
The process of looking at our lives and pruning the dead wood is essential. Coming to our death surrounded by untouched dreams and unlived life is perhaps the deepest grief we can encounter. I have sat with many people in their later years who possessed a profound remorse for what they had neglected to do in their lifetime. We are here for such a short time, and the call to truly live is something to which we each must respond. My daily practice is to wake and immediately bring my attention to this thought: "I am one day closer to my death. So how will I live this day? How will I greet those I meet? How will I bring soul to each moment? I do not want to waste this day." I find this practice an acute reminder to die before I die, to stay awake.
— Francis Weller
Excerpted from The Wild Edge of Sorrow:
Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred
Work of Grief
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