The Gift of Grief

An elderly man caught my eye on Decatur Street. He was encouraging tourists to drop money in a hat for his friend, a street musician. As we chatted, we realized we were acquainted forty years ago. He was the neighbor of a family I’m close to from the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. When I asked how he was doing, he replied, “a hard life makes a good song.” The past forty years had not been kind to him. I listened.

I have been trying to listen more – just listen – to wise elders and young people, to birds and trees, to the Earth, to the voice within. The reason for this deep listening is simple. The cries of the world are impossible to ignore and I am unable and unwilling to continue with business as usual. Shedding a few tears over today’s particular loss or atrocity is insufficient. A greater grief is required.

A friend in a Kosmos Circle said there is a bodhisattva named ‘Always Crying’. I can see why we need someone like that, a Great Being whose outpouring of grief is perpetual. And yet, rivers of tears alone are not enough, grieving alone is not enough, so I want to listen and learn what others are thinking and doing with all of this.

In our dominant culture, we don’t give grief its due. I remember when my Eritrean friend lost her husband, how the women in her community gathered around her. The children were cared for elsewhere and for three days my friend mourned, sometimes screaming with grief, sometimes silent with exhaustion. The circle of women wept with her, periodically ululating at moments of peak sadness. As the men smoked cigars and talked quietly in another room, the women grieved with their whole bodies. Those who were able, prepared food or served others until eventually, my friend, emptied of her tears, slowly resumed the rhythm of her life and was able to be there for her three children. This sharing of grief is a gift. A gift we all need now.

Opportunities to share our collective grief are rare. Thanks to the legacy of colonization, most of us are cut off from ancestral rituals or shared ceremonial practices that can help us heal. Our constant exposure to distressing news can lead to a sense of overwhelm or desensitization. Emotional detachment becomes a way to protect ourselves from the constant barrage of painful information. Yet, this very numbing can prevent the radical shifts or systemic changes most needed.

If we are so numb that we can’t even feel the suffering of the world, surely it will eat us alive. To enumerate the ways this is already happening is just to numb us even further. While writing these very words I just learned I have Covid. It’s ironic in a way, to have feared it so long when we are all living in a kind of fevered dream. How can we process our collective pain, all this garbage and brokenness?

Like the silkworm who eats the mulberry plant, pain is difficult to chew and hard to swallow. The leaves are tough and the edges are sharp. Yet, from this formidable food the tiny animal has an amazing capacity to produce a thread of perfect silk. Could it be that our pain is the very compost we need to grow our solidarity and renew our compassion?

Can we humans also learn to spin gold from straw? Is this what it means to sing a good song? Many beings are living hard lives, yet there is such beauty in life itself. As Earth suffers, she still sings her song of abundance. She sings in flowers and fruit trees, rivers and seas. The moon is still there for us, the morning dew.

In this issue of Kosmos, I feel the need to honor the weight of our pain, personal and collective. However, these stories also show us that healing is possible when we know how to grieve well. Approached with humility and reverence, it empties and transforms us. The Gift of Grief points to the need for shared ceremonial practices and offers examples of courageous healing. Just as artists draw inspiration from hardship to create raw, powerful work, our tears can wash away our illusions and bring us to clarity. Love, joy and beauty also have this power. We can’t ever forget that and they will always be found in Kosmos.

I don’t know yet how to grieve the world, but I think we can only grieve what we love. Love burns in the heart of mourning. Therefore, the call to grieve the world is not separate from the call to love it – to love the Earth and all who dwell here. We must be willing to hear the cries of the world and open our hearts. I am listening.

Kosmos Editor, R. Fabian

Kosmos Journal Volume 2023 Issue 2

Decolonization

Being Taught by Sacred Pain

By Cash Ahenakew (Ph.D.)

"In an attempt to keep us feeling individualized and separate from the land-metabolism, modernity takes away our sense of the unquestionable value of life and instead creates a fundamental void that we associate with worthlessness. To feel a temporary sense of self-worth, we are made to produce stuff that modernity recognizes as valuable. To feel a sense of completion, we are made to accumulate stuff that we believe can fill the void.”

Healing

Hope Leans Forward | The Body as Grounded Wisdom

By Valerie Brown

"For years after the miscarriages, I felt barren and broken by the loss, shame, and guilt. There was a ragged, dispossessed part of me that I couldn’t shake. Here in the cold spring dampness of Kōya-san, my loss and grief were acknowledged and shared...I sensed that those in the cemetery around me understood and made space for the grieving to be and to breathe.”

Endings

The River Threshold

By Jonathan McRay

"She and I sat at a picnic table near a stream with a therapist who was also my uncle, and we said out loud in the summer June air that we couldn’t give what the other wanted. She said she couldn’t live with me anymore and be who she wanted to be. I said I couldn’t live indefinitely separate and fragmented. We said these things for the purpose of freeing each other, though freedom didn’t liberate like we thought.”

Nature

To Lament | Dawn Songs and the Human-Bird Bond

By Jamie K. Reaser, PhD

"The term ‘lament’ is typically associated with grief, with sorrow, with loss. Maybe the loss is physical – a beloved passes. Maybe the loss is etheric – a longed for dream of what could be is dissolved by circumstance. Those who have awakened to the nature of dawn songs lament the loss of birds… Perhaps lamentation is a song that enables the necessary mystery to find us in ways that we long to be found.”

Positive Futures

Seven Foundations for a New Era

By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

"I know that the coming decades will be darker, as the seas rise and the forests burn, as climate refugees flood the borders of our present world order. And that those clinging to the old stories will resist these primal changes, often through power and oppression. But over the last decades I have sensed, seen deep in the inner worlds...how the Earth Herself is changing. And I believe that there is a need to begin to work with these changes."

Economics

From Expansion to Harmonisation | a new economic trajectory

By Paddy Le Flufy

"If we do not stop degrading the natural environment, it will collapse, so we must harmonise our global society with the natural world. If we allow global inequalities to remain embedded, we will perpetuate hardship on a vast scale, so we must harmonise our human cultures with one another. And if we continue to desire ever-increasing consumption without regard to its negative effects, we will suffer terrible consequences, so we must harmonise our aspirations with our opportunities."