A Renewed Literacy of Grief
Finding Center in a World On Fire
“I stand against the militarization of grief.”
This, exactly this. My good friend Joni texted me early a few mornings ago in a great outpouring of grief, frustration and pain. A prominent Israeli journalist wrote a week or so back that we are not grief literate… . And this is precisely the problem, unprocessed grief comes out as rage and revenge.
During these burning days, it can feel like grief is insurmountable and there is no way forward. Violence against ecosystems is matched by violence against humanity, and a hundred tributaries of grief get washed into a vast mapless torrent."
Decades, centuries of unprocessed grief, unacknowledged trauma. Not just in Gaza, but across the globe. We live in an epidemic of grief illiteracy.
Years ago, when my now 18 year-old was born, I began to learn about attachment parenting, non violent communication, and other modalities that center the compassionate raising of children. I became what I called a ‘radical attachment nanny’ and ran a very small home daycare after my marriage fell apart. I wondered if attachment could be maintained or repaired during the trauma of divorce and sharing custody of a 2 year-old. I read books and attended courses with Gordon Neufeld, Marshall Rosenberg, Jean Leidloff, Jon Young, Bill Plotkin and learned about how our ancestors as well as present day hunter-gatherer cultures have raised and educated children. I learned that they kept their children close by co sleeping, breast feeding for extended years, and bringing their children along throughout the day, while they went about their tasks, learning life ways. Learning happened all the time, as John Holt, creator of the term ‘Unschooling’ asserted. Learning wasn’t separate from the rest of life. Learning didn’t come with the cost of disconnection from love, intuition, nature, the larger life story.
I learned about alternative schooling, Waldorf, Montessori, Reggio and how they arose after WW11 as a response to the question, What if we raised children differently?
Nowadays, I am primarily trying to understand the role of grief work and the medicine of old tales in healing, reconciliation, peace-keeping, and maintaining the irrefutable necessity of balance in all eco-systems, which, by the way, always include humans. Among these indigenous cultures, there is - for those still living, and was - for those desiccated and buried, the notion that each of us has an ecological niche, no different than a salmon, or Oak tree, or wetland. That each of us is essential and needed.
I am deeply grateful for the work of Francis Weller, Randy and Rowena Jones, Tom Brown Jr, Jon Young, Bill Plotkin, and Sal Gencarelli in those realms as well as Indigenous writers Martin Prechtel, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé and Tyson Yunkaporta, for the ways they have tracked and brought forward traditional earth-based understandings of how balance and reciprocity can be upheld. I’m deeply grateful too for their vulnerable retelling of how colonization ravaged their people’s life ways, and continues to do so.
It was Jon Young, his many mentors and collaborators, Tom Brown Jr and Grandfather Stalking Wolf, Jake and Judy Swamp, Ingwe, among others that settled into the 8 directional map of the Seasons and Human Life Cycles to helps track the 512 Attributes of Connection or as a friend jokingly calls them the ‘512 Wounds of Colonialism’. I do not know them all, 512 is a lot! But they are gathered up in 8 shields or directions. Bill Plotkin in his book, Nature and The Human Soul, outlines similar diseases of disconnection of the ego-centric human development in an 8 directional model, and compares these to life within an Eco-centric model.
Through these models I began to more clearly see the wounds we accumulate from birth through each life stage disconnected from nature, communities of deep care, and cosmologies. Without the celebrations, rituals and rites of passage we flail at top speed in one direction towards a perceived ‘progress’ cast out from the natural cycles of return. Since these important threads of connection were rent from our lives, we have been left disoriented, map-less, and lacking an essential fluency in Grief and Gratitude.
This brings us to a mutitude of devastations:, the unimaginable horror of being under direct invasion, being killed as we speak, having our land taken, or having suffered the horrors of colonization in the last few hundred years, continuing to be pushed to the edges of a colonized country; or, the losses of long-ago ancestors who were colonized and had their land-connected life-ways stolen or erased. These losses and devastations are not comparable, and yet, they might each stem from similar deep wounds. We are each, in the modern, industrial world, products of deeply disconnected, non reciprocal life ways. And an unacknowledged, un-grieved wound becomes a trauma locked in the bone, sinew or organs of our being. Grief that is acknowledged, welcomed, and caught by a caring protector, is transformed. Grief that is not, most often expresses itself as aggression or numbness.
So what is this original wound? When did this wounding begin? How is it propagated? The first wound we meet at birth, at least in the industrial west, might be what grief facilitator and writer, Francis Weller calls in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, one of the Five Gates of Grief: ‘What We Expected and Did Not Receive.’ If fact, he writes that we may not even realize what we have lost.
Weller describes this Gate of Grief as not receiving what our biology evolved to expect: namely to be born into a singing village, with many aunties and uncles welcoming us, holding us, tending to our safety and well being, teaching and telling us stories… keeping us close and safe, and deeply welcomed. This is a wound, as Jon young and Bill Plotkin describe, of the East direction, of Birth, Welcome, Celebration, the Common Senses that belong to us all, and Protection.
Many if not most of us did not feel safe or welcomed when we were born in the glaring lights of the hospital ward, and in those first few years when attachment is so important, and social norms required that we ‘train’ our babies to be self-sufficient. So we have that wound, and the unexpressed grief around it. Perhaps we were taught to sleep alone, breast or bottle feed to a clock, and to cry it out. And if we continued to cry no one would come. We learned to regulate in this way, or perhaps better said, to disregulate in this way, shutting down the very biological mechanism that is designed to keep us alive: crying.
How can we grieve something we don’t even realize we have been missing?
And that’s just the first wound. It goes on, and trust me, it’s painful to revisit these deeply embedded wounds of early childhood and schooling. It’s also very important to mention that it’s not as simple as choosing to breast feed for 3+ years, or have a mother, father, or grand parent stay home to care for a little one. The issue of disconnection is systemic. Without the know how of midwives, the presence of extended family and village, the process of birth and healthy attachment in the early years can be a huge struggle for a primary caregiver, most often the mother. In Malidoma’s Dagara culture it is the entire village’s job to help keep a marriage functioning for example. And when things are hard as they inevitably are, no individual or couple or family has to manage in isolation like is so often the case in modern industrial cultures, just like the baby we once were crying it out alone in the dark. Instead, the Dagara grieve, and process, and rage it out in community ritual. And that’s how it once was, for all of our long-ago ancestors, so my teachers say.
But now we are grief illiterate. And….
We live in a world on fire.
Malidoma Some writes in The Healing Arts of Africa that we need 3 or 4 times more Water than Fire element to keep life in balance. In the Dagara Cosmology of his people, there are five elements, Fire, Water, Earth, Mineral and Nature. They must be kept in balance both within each person, and in the outside world, in communities and all living systems. Each person born has one element that is stronger and which they tend. Water is the element of reconciliation, peace, grief, communication.
We are a world on fire, and
We are grief illiterate. We are deeply out of balance, and have forgotten that Water is Life. Water is essential for keeping Fire, as usful as it is, in check!
It makes sense that there is so much rage, anger, retaliation in our hearts after centuries of abandoned grief practice. It makes sense that we take sides to defend our kin on this side or the other of the lines the emperors have drawn. But surely we have kin on both sides?!
What we might be missing is that we have been conditioned to take sides, to be angry, to take up arms, trained to NOT GRIEVE, not acknowledge and respond to tears and cries for help and love, not seek peace or reconciliation, trained by hundreds if not thousands of years of colonization and disconnective life ways. So how do we grieve?
How do we begin with shift? How do you take the first, next best step towards a renewed literacy of grief?
How might we find the center, that essential place between poles? How might we hold opposites together?
“We were not meant to live such shallow lives. Our heritage and our psychic make-up are designed for an elaborate richness of imagination and creativity that allows us to feel intimately connected to the ongoing creation,” writes Francis Weller. “We were meant to drop below the surface of things and to experince the depths of life in the same ways in the same ways that our deep time ancestors did. Their lives were filled with story, ritual, circles of sharing. Their lives were not shamefully hidden away but known - losses, defeats, grief, painds, joys, births, deaths, sorrows: the communal draw of life was open and acknowledged. This is what the soul expected. This is what we need today.” p 62 The Wild Edge of Sorrow.
So, I’d like to tell you about a secret, an ancient craft both vessel and art, that likely traveled on the back of a condor or perhaps in a dream. It’s a way forward or perhaps backwards, or a circular or zingzag way of courting that which has been cast out: deep connection, kinship, a sense of place and purpose. This secret has arrived on my doorstep like a noisy crow: Story Telling, oral storytelling, not written, though both are important keys. We are story beings and stories are our elders, as the mythologists, Martin Shaw, Michael Meade, Clarissa Pinkola Estes and many others say - Stories, arose out of the Earth 10 000 years ago, right on time! Myths, folk and fairy tales are store-houses that hold information about what is worth living and dying for. They teach us how to hold beginnings and endings together. They teach us to have a foot in both worlds, to hold the tension of opposites together. They teach us that that there is always the third way in the fork in the road, the trickster, the counsel of all beings.
The old tales and ritual go together, like song, drumming, and dance, they emerged around the hearth fire, where together our ancestors wove the individual stories of their days, their trials and tribulations, grievances and celebrations, with the wisdom stories carried by the elders, and with the flicker of fire, swoop of owl, shooting of stars. They found themselves inside the stories, each with a place for their troubles, and we can too.
I have been blessed to experience the transformative power of Story and Grief Ritual over the past few years, and am honoured to be carrying an old tale from a far away people and place that is hard to imagine could hold relevance for any of us today. It is a story, however, that shivers with familiarity, about a world on fire, and how to find centre again after disorientation and loss. It’s a story that holds grief and gratitude as two sides of the same experience, a story about the necessity of standing before loss and devastation, not looking away, AND about creative, celebratory play…
Are you curious?
Learn more about Heart Render, A weekend to soften and break up the calcification of the heart through movement, poetry, story and the alchemy of ritual.
I think I’d better wrap up this bundle for now, though I more to tell, and so in the way I have been taught, I have many to thank for my being here, writing so that you can read, breathing and dreaming so that I can contribute to a way-finding during these burning times, many teachers, poets, wild kin. But today, to be brief, I will only mention my gratitude for these three: my cohort of grief and gratitude trackers and tenders, you know who you are; my tears that have always flowed so freely and like all waters carry the essential minerals; and the old tales that help us to remember.
Blessings, Belinda White
Image: In the burn, Anderson Lake Belinda White, Apple Star Photo
