When we collectively grieve, we are constellations, mountain chains, forests of cooperation.
Together. We’re in it together.
Grief has different shapes just like no mountain looks the same.
Mountains have a character and personality, a person-ness, a story just like any one with grief does. Grief is a part of what it means to be human, and as humans, we have vastly different ideas about how the character of grief should look, or can look, or would look. Or what it is ok to feel grief about.
In my far width of friendships, acquaintances, comrades and random connections with strangers I may never see again, I hear a different understanding of grief, each time. A different mountain of personality and shaping. A different take, on how ‘they’ deal with it, channel it, manage it, or see how others ‘should’ be in relationship with this charactered state of being. Just like too, as a culture we have a myriad of ways we see as ‘the right way to live’ while across the world, it could look vastly different. And even within the broader culture we live in (‘we’ speaking from being on Turtle Island and more specifically the United States), there are so many variances within it.
One thing I notice the most in ‘this’ culture, is the tendency for grief to be seen as something that should be an individualized experience, that someone personally goes through, and personally deals with and is personally responsible for what the process looks like to ‘get to the other side.’ And getting to the other side is always the goal, that grief is something we’re supposed to be making out way out of, not sitting with the reality of as a state of being. Static, yes, nothing is static. Everything is always moving. Even our feelings. Our reactions, or stories. Our mountains are indeed always being shaped by the wind or water, or the creation of topsoil by the life that springs forth every growing season or the rocks that crumble down from their vast bodies. Nothing is static, yes, but, it’s not that simple in how time is understood in relation to grief.
Grieving often happens alone or in private. It isn’t always appropriate to publicly express it, or to show such strong emotion of sadness or despair in public or in a group setting. Funerals in this culture are often solem, where everyone is trying to hold back their tears, embarrassed if a flood comes through, or if the display of sadness is ‘too much’ or too theatrical. And again, in the vein of recognizing different characters of grief, and the different personalities of mountains, the diversity of culture that exists within the Overlord culture of this country, this continent, the West in general, or the thread of modernity affecting just about anyone on this globe, is one that contains so many micro worlds and differences. It is the differences within this Overlording, that give me some sense of hope that diversity can still exist and persist in the homogeneity of vast strip malls, mundane colors, the narrative of being a consumer not a person, formulaic birth and death and every aspect of our lives capitalized.
You still find funerals with wailing and moaning for the dead, song and movement and bodies thrashing, together, unable to keep the grief inside, the need to express, for some… is something that cannot be kept in to be done in private. For some, even within this culture, this still exists. Yet, for the most of us who live or spend time right here, it doesn’t. And whether we are comfortable with this group trance experience or not, a deep part of us needs it, and recognizes it, or doesn’t consciously, and it manifests in other ways in our life.
Collective grief. As individual mountains, we are our own ecosystems, our own milky ways, our own set of stars. When we collectively grieve, just like when we love another, our individuality dissolves, maybe not totally, but some, in bits, enough, to feel connected to something bigger.
When we collectively grieve, we are constellations, mountain chains, forests of cooperation.
Together. We’re in it together.
We see a resurgence of folks responding to this need to collectively wail and cry and scream together in the intentional gatherings of grief rituals, mostly done in a crowd of new-age-ish groups, or their tangentially connected friends and comrades, realizing that this is some kind of thing…needed. We also see different forms of it say, in the space of Pentecostal churches, where within those walls, the wailing and thrashing and speaking in tongues.. is well, good. Practically nothing is too strange. There’s a lot to say about the need for collective trance, of which The Emerald Podcast covers a lot, I’d recommend you take a chance at listening in that space.
I participated in one grief ritual myself this past summer, and it was like something I’ve never seen or experienced.
Over 100 people were there, with some energy of despair, anger, or sadness to share with the earth itself, and all of us in it together. When I was younger, I would have maybe been vastly uncomfortable with this kind of ceremony, of screaming, wailing, throwing mud and pine cones and spitting, fists hitting the ground, crying into pillows, rocking, shaking and wretched release. This time though, I was raw and right there, and totally comfortable in the space. There are areas of the ritual where people go and express what they need as long as they need, in front of an altar of earthen origins, and others sit on the outside, waiting until they feel called to express themselves or support someone else who is doing what they feel called to do. There is no religious affiliation here. It’s a ritual, but it’s not necessarily anything that belongs in form to a institution of such.
Noone was there shaming me for my emotional pain (or joy).
Noone was telling me to hurry up and get over it.
Noone was telling me that my remembering of a situation was incorrect or wrongly taken.
Noone was telling me I was too sensitive or ‘holding onto the past.’
Noone was telling me I was victimizing myself, or lying about what happened, or overreacting.
Noone was telling me that I was taking too long in processing my feelings about things.
Noone was telling me to keep it secret.
Noone was mocking my grief or tears or expression of hurt and love.
Noone was telling me I should trust again instantly.
Or that I’m somehow attached to the pain, the narrative, or the stories around how I have been treated wrongly, or had something unfortunate happen to me or someone or some place I love that simply is held in the tissues of my body.
Instead, we just witnessed and supported one another.
Music was playing. Laurence Cole was the facilitator, someone who has been doing this work for a long time.
He said, anger is ok.
In his poetic way, he channeled the spirit of people’s individual griefs, and affirmed it for them, without judgement. Without trying to fix it. Without telling someone they should change how they feel. The container was safe and set. Afterwards, there was some time to share. Sometimes these grief ceremonies can go for days on end. People allot time to go, and share in the work together of moving things not alone. We took a whole day for this work, and at the end of it, when it was time to jet over to a busy trade blanket, I was in an altered state of consciousness.
I wouldn’t say this experience ‘fixed’ anything, overnight, for me at least. It didn’t solve the bigger problems of the stigmatization of public or collective grief in this culture. We all go on our separate ways and continue to grieve alone, for the most part, but we got the experience of feeling what it ‘could’ be to change this in our culture, and the medicine of our grief being simply, ok.
Sure, in all of this, despite the need for collective grief rituals and witnessing, and the normalization of the expressions of grief.. we cannot solely rely on anyone else to affirm the feelings we have.
How we feel is ok.
We have to tell ourselves that, and no one else can make it ok, or truly validate how we feel, in the end.
Love or pain, or hurt or joy or excitement or confusion, or even our magical experiences, it’s all our own experiences, and we are responsible for them, and we are also responsible for having internal boundaries that let what others think, feel, say or project, slide through us without leaving such lasting imprints. We have to have the capacity to sift through it, taking what is medicine and leaving what is not. And, as for trauma, its the same. It’s not always simple to have internal boundaries around trauma or how others feel about how we feel.
Internal boundaries are hard, especially when you’ve been taught not to have them. There’s trauma itself in being trained in not being allowed to have good boundaries. In fact, that’s part of the issue for so many people.
Especially when, the micro-cultures we live in have such vastly differing ideas about what is real or ok, or acceptable or not.
We are sometimes taught harmful things are ok (like physically assaulting children and calling it proper punishment), and sometimes things that are good, are not considered ok (like public grief, as we are talking about right now). But again, cultural differences, rooted in unanalyzed historical lineages of disconnect that manifest differently in every generation, are the essence of this variability of belief. Sometimes, whatever it takes to reinforce a reality or narrative is a part of the orchestrated work of moving trauma transferring through bodies from one generation to the next. And it’s inherently gaslighting, a word used to describe this practice of telling someone their feelings aren’t valid, or their experience isn’t real, or isn’t true in some way, or isn’t ok to experience, or that in fact their sense of reality isn’t ok, and they are perhaps crazy, or the one doing the action that is brought up, or they did it to themself, or was the one to blame for someone else’s harmful actions. We’re taught to do this to one another often, in order to reinforce the stories of the past, the social conditioning that is harmful but normalized, it’s the only way to justify it sometimes.
It happened to us, so you can deal with it too.
We had it worse, so it can’t be that bad.
Your trauma wasn’t as bad as mine.
You don’t have right to feel that way.
We didn’t know then, it was just the way it was, and there’s nothing I can do about it now.
We aren’t responsible for how our ancestors treated theirs/yours.
It wasn’t that bad, you are exaggerating.
That never happened.
And so on… many things are said.
How do we feel about it? How do we let it affect us? Are words violent or not? Is violence only perpetrated in physical harm? So, then, does psychological abuse exist?
In my opinion, yes. The culture we live in in a way, is psychologically abusing us at times. What we are told to believe. How we are told to be guilty if we don’t think this, believe that, or if we feel this or that. It’s overwhelming sometimes. For some folks, it strongly affects how their physical brains function. We are social creatures. How this plays out, strongly affects how our ability to function and relate plays out.
How do we manage the grief of not being able to grieve? Of the very community that should be holding us, shaming us instead? Or not knowing what to do?
I mean they weren’t held either. Most of us aren’t. Like I’ve said, and we all could agree in one way or another, that collective grief isn’t normalized in this culture. That is what creates this very shaming in the first place. The discomfort is palpable for so many folks. Seeing someone else in pain is hard. Especially when we haven’t been allowed to fully express it ourselves either. It hasn’t been safe to. Safety comes in many forms.
It begs us to ask ourselves how we truly create a moral compass. This was a big constant conversation when I studied Philosophy and Religion formally. How do we determine what is right or wrong? Do we need an outside divine force to tell us, to dictate it for us, or as humans do we have the capacity to judge this from within ourselves? Of course the answers to this vary are are often divided. Secularism would take any kind of divinity out of the process of sussing out good and bad. And then religiosity often makes it solely a divine process, and doesn’t leave room for other nuance, and for us to trust our fellow peers and community without the fear of punishment from God, or some outside peering source.
But I tangent here, but as it goes, this is related to that.
We can’t talk about how our culture and we as individuals see grief, trauma, and emotion without looking at morality.
Without looking at history.
Without looking at sociological patterns.
We can’t look at ecology without looking at grief, because our connection to the land is at the heart of our discomfort with grief.
We can’t talk about ecology without talking about morality, and what determines it for each of us.
It’s a lot to live in the world we live in and navigate the overwhelming feelings that come with traversing right and wrong, when we are pressured to feel a certain way about land and one anothers’ depths, or our own grief in relationship to land or one other, when we might know in our bodies that something else is actually right.
To grieve things that happened to us or in connection to us, or the loss of a landscape of living beings, or the loss of a mountain to mountain-top removal, requires us to love fully, unconditionally, and not numb ourselves. It requires a lot of complicated navigation of the social nuances of grief in modern times on the whole.
It’s something to celebrate, that we have the capacity to feel such deep pain. Without it, we’d continue to blow up mountains. Well, we do. But many of us feel deeply that it isn’t ok, even though others morally feel it is.
Talking to a friend recently, he described it like etching a path in different materials. Some things go instantly, like with making shape in water. Some things take a little wind or weather, like making a line in sand, to whisk away the channels set. Some things get set pretty deeply and take a lot of work to chisel away, like in the furrows of stone.
It’s not for us to judge for anyone else how a trauma might manifest in someone else’s body. We’re all unique mountains after all, like waves in an ocean, becoming and unbecoming in the incarnations we inhabit, and each of us is as unique as those mountain spirits.
Whether I know the answers here, is not the point. I guess the point is that, we are all affected by things differently. More compassion is needed. More discomfort with grief. Deep unconditional love. What would our world look like if more of us accepted the grief of others and didn’t try to shame or will it away? What if the suffering was accepted and honored and celebrated? Again, I am thinking of The Emerald Podcast, I didn’t think I would be thinking of Josh’s work when I started this piece but here it is. In one episode he describes the trance of ritualized group pain, like ceremonial piercings, scarring and poking. Intentional sleep deprivation. Intentional fasting. Intentional outcasting. Containers for suffering that become modes for transforming trauma or also, bonding us socially to a group. If we had more collective grief normalization, how would we be less individualistic? More understanding of others? More willing to protect the land? More willing to think outside of the constructs our immediate culture hands us as easy formulatic rituals?
Again, I often ask more questions with Ground Shots, than anything. I end up with more questions, too. I honor feeling deeply. Connecting things from different places, because I think it is needed. Somewhere inside of me, In the depth of my own grief that has informed my work as an adult, I find this medicine of connection. And I keep going despite it all. Despite everything that has told me to numb that sensitivity. To not feel greatly because it is uncomfortable to others. Or too much to ask. Or too much for someone else to hold.
Whatever it is. Lie in the face of pain and suffering and tears and don’t look away.
Don’t push away.
Don’t shame or blame or gaslight it out of existence as it didn’t happen.
What can we do to practice this?
Do you think about this or try this in your life?
Can you empathize with what I’m saying here, that we may share a commonality across the screen?