The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

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In traditional cultures people were often given at least a year to digest a major loss. In ancient Scandinavia it was common to spend a prolonged period “living in the ashes.” Not much was expected of you while you did the essential work of transforming sorrow into something of value to the community. The Jewish tradition observes a year of mourning filled with observances and rituals to help the grieving stay connected to their sorrow and not let it drift away. Most people today might get a week of bereavement leave, at best, and then everything should be fine. Malidoma Somé, author of The Healing Wisdom ofAfrica: Finding Life Purpose Through Nature, Ritual, andCommunity

The Wild Edge of Sorrow - North Atlantic Books The Wild Edge of Sorrow - North Atlantic Books

At times, grief invites us into a terrain that reduces us to our most naked self. We find it hard to meet the day, to accomplish the smallest of tasks, to tolerate the greetings of others. We feel estranged from the world and only marginally able to navigate the necessities of eating, sleeping, and self-care. Some other presence takes over in times of intense grief, and we are humbled, brought to our knees. We live close to the ground, the gravity of sorrow felt deep in our bones.” Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., author of Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypseand Collapsing Consciously . In the Absence of the Ordinary is filled with treasures of insight from the heart of a wise, poetic, and fearless guide for exploring the shadowy terrain of the soul. He reaches deep into the holy ground of our awakening — both individual and collective— and with fierce kindness, invites us to become purposeful apprentices of fear, sorrow, and loss. Francis Weller knows that beyond sorrow is new possibility that can be discovered in our encounter with soul loss and renewal. Weller offers a compassionate and prophetic voice as we navigate our world in great transition and cross the threshold from our adolescence and into our early adulthood as a human community. Weller offers an inspired, uplifting, and unique voice for moving into our deeply uncertain future. I highly recommend this book."I recently interviewed Stephen Jenkinson, known to some as the Griefwalker. In the interview he spoke of the etymology of the word “catastrophe.” The Greek prefix cata, refers to a descent—a going down and inward. “Strophe” is a suffix that is associated with braiding or interweaving a connection. In summary, Jenkinson asserted that this time of “catastrophe” compels us to descend—to go downward rather than soaring; to focus inwardly as much as we pay attention to the external world—and, to do this together in connection and community. For Jenkinson, conscious grieving is a skill that we must develop at this moment of loss and demise. And he further concludes that our work is to open to the descent together and to create communities of individuals who are practicing the skill of grieving for ourselves and for the Earth. F or a man who specializes in grief and sorrow, psychotherapist Francis Weller certainly seems joyful. When I arrived at his cabin in Forestville, California, he emerged with a smile and embraced me. His wife, Judith, headed off to garden while Francis led me into their home among the redwoods to talk. This ritual brought us face-to-face with the reality of losing those we love. Letting go is a difficult skill to acquire, and yet we are offered no option but to practice. Every loss, personal or shared, prepares us for our own time of leaving. Letting go is not a passive state of acceptance but a recognition of the brevity of all things. This realization invites us to love fully now, in this moment, when what we love is here.” Amidst the plethora of books on the inner life, very rarely do I encounter one that opens my mind and heart to completely new possibilitiesessential to my deepest humanity. The Wild Edge of Sorrow , however, is brimming with sentences that take me beyond what I already know, much as a great poem can, to utterly new dimensions of whatit means to be courageously alive to myself and the world around me. Wellerworks this magic not only through the wisdom he offers about how to honor our grief — at both personal and planetary levels — but also through the warmth andmusic of his language, which is in itself a healing medicine for the soul. Thisbook is not only a map to navigate some of the most tender and difficult regionsof the psyche, but a work of literary art.”- Kim Rosen, author Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words Most of us instinctively turn from what makes us uncomfortable. Yet often the greatest gifts lie hidden in what we avoid. Certainly at this time we have much to grieve both as individuals and as a culture; but our collective amnesia about the traditional practices of grieving keep us from uncovering the buried treasures that could be our salvation. In fact, the accumulated weight of our ungrieved losses may be at the root of what is fragmenting our world.

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In The Wild Edge of SorrowFrancisWeller offers his readers a breath-taking and dramatic journey of inner discovery into personal pain resolution,planetary healing, and soul development. It is an essential publication—one that offers precious guidance and insight for those who are strong enough,as well as mature enough, to probe and challenge the darkness.” William Blake said, “The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.” When we send our grief into exile, we simultaneously condemn our lives to an absence of joy. This gray-sky existence is intolerable to the soul. It shouts at us daily to do something about it, but in the absence of meaningful ways to respond to sorrow or from the sheer terror of entering the terrain of grief naked, we turn instead to distraction, addiction, or anesthesia. On my visit to Africa, I remarked to one woman that she had a lot of joy. Her response stunned me: “That’s because I cry a lot.” This was a very un-American sentiment. She didn’t say it was because she shopped a lot, worked a lot, or kept herself busy. Here was Blake in Burkina Faso—sorrow and joy, grief and gratitude, side by side. It is indeed the mark of the mature adult to be able to carry these two truths simultaneously. Life is hard, filled with loss and suffering. Life is glorious, stunning, and incomparable. To deny either truth is to live in some fantasy of the ideal or to be crushed by the weight of pain. Instead, both are true, and it requires a familiarity with both sorrow and joy to fully encompass the full range of being human.” Beginning in 1997, Ibegan to offer grief rituals as a way for communities to attend the large and small losses that touch each of our lives. What has become clear is how difficult it is for us to attend to our grief in the absence of community. Carried privately, sorrow lingers in the soul, slowly pulling us below the surface of life and into the terrain of death. Another facet of our aversion to grief is fear. Hundreds of times in my practice as a therapist, I have heard how fearful people are of dropping into the well of grief. The most frequent comment is “If I go there, I’ll never return.” What I found myself saying one day was rather surprising. “If you don’t go there, you’ll never return.” It seems that our wholesale abandonment of this core emotion has cost us dearly, pressed us toward the surface of our lives. We live superficial lives and feel the gnawing ache of something missing. If we are to return to the richly textured life of soul and to participation with the soul of the world, we must pass through the intense region of grief and sorrow.” At this time of year we sit in a transition moment between summer and fall. Vacations are ending or have ended, children and college students are contemplating returning to the classroom, and in the Northern Hemisphere, most of us are aware that within the next two months, we may experience the first frost or even the first snowfall.Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force.... It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.” For many, summer is a time to forget all of that—warm days and nights, cannon ball dives in the swimming pool, perhaps even a summer romance. As a child, I remember how short-lived all summers seemed to be and how onerous the return to school felt in the fall. In a powerful side-note, Weller cautions readers to avoid the widespread blame flung at so many parents: There is often a feeling of shame attached to the survivors of suicide, a hidden doubt that they might not have done enough to prevent this death. This is a doubling of the pain. Their grief is bound together with shame, making it more difficult to talk with others and get the support they need. Finding the courage to share your experience with others is an essential piece in mending this profound sorrow.” The violence, oppression and injustice wear us down, no matter how much we try to run from it or medicate it. We suffer greatly from both amnesia and anesthesia—a painful cycle of forgetting and numbing. Weller implores us to get out of our individual denial bubbles and embrace what psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan calls “intervulnerability,” an increased awareness of the suffering all around us, in both humans and more-than-humans, and to focus our attention and energy on healing the whole.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred

Think about how much energy we expend trying to deny and avoid these parts of ourselves. What if all that energy were available to us again? We would laugh more. We’d know more joy. Life is asking us to meet it on its terms, not ours. We try to control every minute detail, but life is too rambunctious, too wild. We simply can’t avoid the losses, wounds, and failures that come into our lives. What we can do is bring compassion to what arrives at our door and meet it with kindness and affection. We can become a good host. Our soul knows we are designed for a bigger, more sensuous, and more imaginative life. But we can go for days, weeks, months, a lifetime with only marginal encounters with beauty and the wild, only rarely sharing an intimate moment with a friend.”

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Noted psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in this lyrical yet practical handbook for mastering the art of grieving. Describing how Western patterns of amnesia and anesthesia affect our capacity to cope with personal and collective sorrows, Weller reveals the new vitality we may encounter when we welcome, rather than fear, the pain of loss. Through moving personal stories, poetry, and insightful reflections he leads us into the central energy of sorrow, and to the profound healing and heightened communion with each other and our planet that reside alongside it.

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A rich and varied conversation between Michael Lerner, founder and director of Commonweal and Francis Weller, exploring the Long Dark that is emerging in our culture and the planet. ​ To honor our grief, to grant it space and time in our frantic world, is to fulfill a covenant with soul—to welcome all that is, thereby granting room for our most authentic life.”

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When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.” Silence and solitude allow us to move beyond thought and into our embodied experience. Grief is felt, sensed in the viscera of our bellies, the inner walls of our chests, the curve of our shoulders, the heaviness in our thighs. Grief is registered in our sinews and muscles. It feels laboured, as though a great weight has settled on our chest or a heaviness has entered our bones. We know grief by its felt experience; it is tangible. It is here, in our sighing and sensing body, that we encounter the terrain of sorrow.”