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

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Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close. Alone and together, death and loss affect us all.” Where there is sorrow,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “there is holy ground.” These gatherings are an invitation to enter the sacred ground of grief and encounter the ways it enables us to walk in this world with its attendant harsh realities of loss and death. We discover how sorrow shakes us and breaks us open to depths of soul we could not imagine. Grief offers a wild alchemythat transmutes suffering into fertile ground. We are made real and tangible by theexperience of sorrow, adding substance and weight to our world. We are stripped of excess and revealed as human in our times of grief. In a very real way grief ripens us, pullsup from the depths of our souls what is most authentic in our beings. In truth, without some familiarity with sorrow, we do not mature as men and women. It is the broken heart, the heart that knows sorrow that is also capable of genuine love. Resilience is a program of Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the world transition away from fossil fuels and build sustainable, resilient communities. 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.” Weller: The bias against going down arises from our cultural conditioning. Christian mythology teaches that resurrection and ascension are the proper directions for a spiritual life. The very earth is seen as a fallen place, and our bodies are perceived as fallen objects that can be redeemed only by the soul finally getting out of this tawdry place and moving on to its final reward. You rise above, getting better, higher, and lighter. But low-lying places of regression, of descent, of lamentation are not less sacred. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “No matter how deeply I go into myself / my God is dark, and like a webbing made / of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”

The Wild Edge of Sorrow - Penguin Random House

We live in a culture in which, as Weller writes, “…grief has been colonized by the clinical world, taken hostage by diagnoses and pharmaceutical regimes” whereas on the other hand, “…grief is not a problem to be solved, not a condition to be medicated, but a deep encounter with an essential experience of being human.” (xviii) To die before we die means that we must become radically honest with ourselves. We must shed the skins that do not foster aliveness. One man, while participating in the first weekend of the Men of Spirit initiation, suddenly realized how conscripted and narrow his life was. At that moment, he jumped out of his chair and flung it across the room in disgust. He clearly saw that he had unwittingly made an agreement to live small and to consistently tell himself what a good life he was living. This realization broke him open to the great well of grief he was carrying in his heart from all the times he had abandoned himself for the sake of fitting in and getting approval.” But what more does an apprenticeship with sorrow offer us? Do we merely discharge our grief and move on?In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller offers his readers a breath-taking and dramatic journey of inner discovery into personal pain resolution, plane-tary 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 ch allenge the darkness." - Spirituality Today. ​ 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 territory of grief is heavy. Even the word carries weight. Grief comes from the Latin word 'gravis,' meaning 'heavy,' from which we also get grave, gravity and gravid. We use the word gravitas to speak of a quality in some people who are able to carry the weight of the world with a dignified bearing. And so it is, when we learn to carry our grief with dignity.” 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. To alter the amnesia of our times, we must be willing to look into the face of the loss and keep it nearby. In this way, we may be able to honor the losses and live our lives as carriers of their unfinished stories. This is an ancient thought - how we tend the dead is as important as how we tend the living.”

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

Whereas our culture assumes that public grieving is somewhat childish, Francis Weller passionately asserts that “Grief is the work of mature men and women.” Moreover, it is not a private matter that we should isolate within the four walls of our home or conceal by wearing sunglasses in public. Many indigenous cultures and generations of our ancestors understood that grief is a communal event. It is, says Weller, “…an intensely interior process that can only be navigated in the presence of community.” (116) For many tribes, community grieving was a way of maintaining “soul hygiene” because the community knew that when people do not grieve, they become toxic to the rest of the community. Over the last thirty years, I have worked with grief in my practice as a psychotherapist and workshop leader. 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 to me 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. Bill Plotkin,author of Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche and Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and PsycheWe will, in truth, spend many of our hours alone with our grief. In the cover of our solitude, we encounter another layer in our apprenticeship with sorrow. Here we are asked to hold an extended vigil with loss in the well of silence, slowly ripening our sorrow into something dense and gifting to the world. Our ability to drop into this interior world and do the difficult work of metabolizing sorrow is dependent on the community that surrounds us. Even when we are alone, it is necessary to feel the tethers of concern and kindness holding us as we step off into the unknown and encounter the wild edge of sorrow.” Psychologist Robert Romanyshyn speaks to this as the value of melancholy. He describes it as “the result of a grief endured, the deep wisdom of the soul which recognizes that life is about loss, and that love tempered by grief, allows one to cherish the ordinary, simple moments of everyday life, even as we know they are passing away.” Gudrun Zomerland has written about trauma as “the shaking of a soul.” “The German word for trauma [is] ‘Seelenerschütterung.’ The first part, ‘Seele’ means soul. . . . ‘Erschütterung’ is something that shakes us out of the ordinary flow and out of our usual sense of time into an extraordinary state.”32 Trauma, then, is a soul-shaking experience that ruptures the continuity of our lives and tosses us into an alternate existence. When this soul shaking occurs frequently and early in life, as a result of prolonged neglect, what was originally an extraordinary state gradually becomes ordinary. It is the world as we know it—unsafe, unreliable, and frightening. This is a profound loss and a lingering sorrow that is difficult to hold. The failure of the world to offer us comfort in the face of trauma causes us to retreat from the world. We live on our heels, cautiously assessing whether it is safe to step in; we rarely feel it is. One man I worked with slowly revealed how he expected less than zero from life. He deserved nothing. He had a hard time asking for salt at a restaurant. His persistent image in therapy was of a small boy hiding behind a wall. It was not safe for him to venture into the world. He was terrified of being seen. I know, because I lived this way for forty years, wary and determined to prevent further pain by remaining on the margins of life, untouchable and seemingly safe.”

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

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. 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.” Teacher and grief specialist Stephen Jenkinson says, “Hold your sorrow to a degree of eloquence, whereby everyone around you will be fed by your efforts to do so.”11 Becoming skillful at digesting our grief makes us a source of reassurance and stability for the wider community.” In that moment, I understood powerfully the cost to a child who had to be the one to make the overture of repair. If I hadn’t gone in there, my son would have had to ingest his fear that I did not want to be his father any longer. The worst part of it, however, is that he would have felt it was his fault—if he hadn’t been so exuberant, so needy for my attention, I might still hold him in my heart. He would feel he had to restrain these parts of himself in the future if he was to receive my love once again.” Weller: We go numb to try to cope with the fact that we have not b

I’m someone who strictly reads books with a pen in hand. I do, after all, have standards. Francis Weller, though, is someone who writes books that force me to rearrange my standards for what gets underlined. His recent release The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief(2015) follows that trend. One-fourth of my copy is penned up. If I applied normal standards, though, it would easily be two-thirds. Paragraphs swim through waves of sentences pounding the reader with profundity. For the most part, I’m a typically unexpressive, work-it-out-in-my-head white heterosexual male. Weller, though, sparks something deeper in me. I found myself nodding, slapping inanimate objects, muttering out loud “Yep, holy shit.” An example from early in the book: The Wild Edge of Sorrow is extraordinary. I'm going to be giving it to a lot of people. So many of the themes explored are things I care deeply about. For example, the betrayal of our Great Expectation that life is supposed to be far more magical, authentic, intimate, and alive than what has been offered to us as normal. The ongoing pain of separation from community and nature that we all feel. And the pain of the earth. Reading Weller’s book, I've realized that we have a lot of unprocessed grief to share. This book will be a gift to many." The Wild Edge of Sorrow is extraordinary. I'm going to be giving it to a lot of people. So many of the themes explored are things I care deeply about. For example, the betrayal of our Great Expectation that life is supposed to be far more magical, authentic, intimate, and alive than what has been offered to us as normal. The ongoing pain of separation from community and nature that we all feel. And the pain of the earth. Reading Weller’s book, I've realized that we have a lot of unprocessed grief to share. This book will be a gift to many." - Charles Eisenstein, author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible