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In the past weeks I have cried a lot. A dear friend of mine passed and grieving for him opened a portal to an ocean of unshed tears. For personal losses, collective losses, continued losses. Tears that have been waiting a long time to have the space and permission to turn into rivers. Grieving this deep is exhausting, but it is also a humbling, beautiful, and connecting experience. Especially when there are contexts, tools, and containers that make it safe. Another reason why I am grateful for winter right now - its darkness feels like a safe container. But there have been others. Some weeks ago I took part in a beautiful seminar called “Lamenting the Planet: Grief, Art, and Care in a Time of Ecological Crises”. There were many inspiring and meaningful ideas shared and I highly recommend checking out the work of the people who contributed that day (here is the list). But especially one thing stayed with me from this day - the relationship between grief, hope, and care and how inseparable they are. There is no grief without hope and care - we feel climate grief because we are connected, loving, and still believing in the possibility of different futures. The same is true for personal grief: it rises from our bonds, from having loved and continuing to love. Remembering this was so softening - seeing the deep care that is present in the grief. It also reminded me that grieving - whether for a person, a forest, a species, a future - is not something we move through alone, but something we hold together, a practice of tending in a world that needs us to keep feeling. Last week, I began holding the Wild Women Wintering journey together with eight plant companions, and it is already unfolding into a strong and tender container - another place where grief, hope, and care can meet. We opened by reading a passage from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction as an invocation for this wintering to be a story we carry and tend together. A reminder that the act of holding - stories, losses, memories, anger, sorrow, the unspoken, the sacred - is also a form of care. Here is the passage we read. This Sunday I am heading to Earthwise residency to reunite with some of the people that took part in the Work That Reconnects course I was facilitating in the spring. Work that has been a strong fundament for my path since many years. Work that taught me especially how “honouring our pain” is a way of becoming truly alive in the world. It offers practices for meeting our grief, our fear, and our longing with courage and companionship, and I continue to bring this work into many different contexts and modalities. It is work that does its magic whether held in a 1.5-hour session or over several days - work that I believe is so necessary, individually and collectively, as we navigate these turning times together. As these threads continue to unfold, I’m grateful to be able to invite you into some of the spaces where this work is taking shape.
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