Grief and Praise
Could facing towards our grief also be a portal towards more of our aliveness?
As I sit with death (specifically of my grandpa, dear 94.5 year old that he was, who recently passed peacefully in his sleep), I find myself singing more, sitting by the river more, pausing more, resting more.
I’m reminded of the wise invitations of many grief-worker friends: to make space for the fullness of our grief and loss. And then also, to let any [“small”] grief be a gateway that supports us to tap into the larger oceans of yet-unmetabolized grief below.
But facing into grief can be scary, overwhelming.
What if I get totally swept away? What if I open the floodgates and then can’t close them again?
These concerns make sense. There’s a lot to grieve.
And for most of us, there is a huge backlog of grief. Many of us have lost cultural practices for individual and collective grieving. And there can be a lack of space/language/permission to grieve more ambiguous losses, or the expectation that grief happens on a finite and linear timeline.
And I’m not just talking about grief at the deaths of our human loved ones. Also the death of so many BIPOC siblings, the loss of species, the loss of clean water, the loss of our humanity under racialized capitalism. And on and on…
Grief makes way for power and aliveness
But I think that in our grief lies our power. Especially when we can widen our window around what needs grieving, acknowledging the breadth of what we have lost.
And not so we get stuck there, wallowing - but so it can move through us, enliven us, connect us to what matters, to what we love.
“Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses." - Martin Prechtel
As we make more space for our grief, I have come to believe that we also make more space for our joy.
It’s like if we narrow our window of feeling and expression, both “ends of the pole” (not that our feelings are on a linear spectrum exactly🏳️🌈) get muted, less accessible.
But the good news is that we can keep widening that window of feeling and expression, growing our capacity to feel more fully alive.
Baby steps towards grief
So how do we make space for our grief, and for our praise/joy?
I’m grateful for a wealth of resources that can support us in moving in bite-sized, daily ways towards our grief. (And joy!)
First, just take a moment to notice a couple of things you are grieving today. These could be seemingly tiny things or huge things: ongoing wars around the globe, loved ones who have passed recently or long ago, regret at something you said or did, a rupture in a significant relationship, a change in life that means some sort of letting go.
Notice what happens in your body as you call these losses in with you.
Offer yourself some gratitude for making space for grief. See if there’s any small way you want to honor or acknowledge or ritualize this grief. Maybe you light a candle, place a photo of an ancestor, take a few slow breaths.
Or, if it doesn’t feel right to go there right now, give yourself a beat of gratitude just for being in the inquiry, and for the wisdom of your body taking care of you by saying “not right now.”
If you have some space to go there, here are a few resources that might invite you a little deeper into the waters of grief:
A series of grief poems from @thishallowedwilderness , BIPOC grief worker
Check out the Grief is a Messenger zine
This resource guide on grief and resilience and community care from the Stoke Collective for ideas on making space for grief in your groups and orgs