Resisting life as it is

Grateful for the lessons, hard as they are

Dear sweet community,

Thank you for being patient with me over the last month as I’ve taken a little pause away from The Grief Space. I’ll be up and running with our bi-weekly newsletters exploring the raw and real nature of grief tending soon. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a more personal update about how and where my heart is.

It’s been a beautiful time of endings and new beginnings as my partner and I packed up our home for the third time in less than two years and moved from Cornwall back to Somerset. Despite a 40-mile search radius we’ve ended up living about 5 minutes away from where we were before. In fact, the house is a stone’s throw from the same woods I have always walked in with beloved Willow (who continues to be a miracle baby and showing no signs of the tumour said to us to be fatal over 18-months ago!)

This year I’ve been apprenticing myself once again to Francis Weller and his beautiful work teaching and tending to grief. I’ve been pouring over his Ritual Training and asking myself the deep and potent questions – what does it mean to carry grief tending work at this time? how can I tend to my own sorrows to keep my heart open and fluid? in what ways can I bring ritual into my daily life? how can I move towards a mature heart – shifting from ‘me’ to ‘we’?

These questions accumulated in a hard and humbling experience last weekend at Medicine Festival here in the UK.

I’ve been attending Medicine since it started four years ago. It is a beautiful gathering of wisdom-keepers, indigenous peoples, and artists of all traditions in prayer, celebration and song. The Grief Space held a circle in 2021 and this year I was set to support a wider team in an outdoor grief ritual on the Saturday afternoon.

I’d bookmarked it to be the highlight of my summer. It was my birthday on the Friday, marking the transition into my 33^rd year. I had gathered friends to join us for the weekend, circled the workshops I looked forward to attending and planned out which moments of collective prayer I didn’t want to miss. I guess in short, I’d set my expectations high.

Perhaps you’ve already sensed what’s coming, but the whole weekend unfolded quite the opposite of what I had hoped. Both Charlie and I ate something funny on Thursday and didn’t sleep that night. On my birthday I felt mostly quite tired and disconnected, and despite many incredibly beautiful moments, I couldn’t quite settle within myself. Then on Saturday, I woke up to missed calls from my family with the news that Boppa (my Mum’s Dad) was suddenly and unexpectedly passing.

So, there I sat, in the stuffy heat of my tent cabin, saying goodbye to my Boppa on the phone. Feeling the tether to my Mum strain and ache. Catching the words in my throat. It was liminal. It was surreal. It was not what I wanted to be doing, not here, not now.

That day I tried everything to drop back into the Medicine space. I sat in a small circle of friends and honoured my Boppa. I snuck into the woods with my love to try and find some peace. I walked to the furthest point of the campsite and sat with a tree. I listened to some of the talks, joined in the prayers and swam in the lake. But I felt agitated, frustrated with myself, and resistant to the truth of the moment.

The truth was that I needed space away from the festival to feel myself again. I needed a good phone signal so I could call my family. I needed to rest and grieve and turn inwards. I needed to surrender and let go of this festival being anything other than what it was.

So we left.

We left everything at the festival and jumped in the car to Charlie’s parents’ house not too far away. Once home in the soft cocoon of familiarity and quiet, I was able to cry. I was able to soften. I was able to open. I spent 24 hours tending to my heart, letting go of expectations of myself and meeting reality as it is, not as it appears on Instagram!

The beauty (of course) is that once I’d listened to my own needs and resourced my heart, I was able to return to the festival again. We made it back in time for the collective peace prayer at the Goddess Fyr. In contrast to the day before when I hadn’t been able to connect to anything let alone offer myself, that Sunday afternoon I was able to be fully present in the call for collective peace.

If grief tending has taught me anything, it has shown me again and again that when we tend to our own sorrows, we carve out more capacity in our hearts to respond authentically to the collective needs of these times. But we can’t show up truthfully if we’re not meeting ourselves first.

By the final day of Medicine festival, I was firmly back in the soft, open, tender place in my heart. I was free of expectation, judgment and comparison. I was humbled and centred, loving and peaceful, grateful and grieving.

Of course, I wish my Boppa’s passing hadn’t coincided with me being at a festival six hours away. I wish it hadn't taken a death to peel away the layers of separation I’d created within myself. But this is life and it is why I continue to be in awe of grief and its soft but radical power to bring us home to ourselves again and again.

I am very grateful to the team at Medicine Festival for the astonishing beauty, care and integrity of their offering and prayer for peace. I am grateful for my privilege to be able to attend such a gathering and to have a safe familiar place to retreat to when I needed it. I am grateful to have learned some powerful lessons about meeting life as it is and not as we hope it will be.

I was reminded of how grief and gratitude co-exist in every moment. I was reminded that peace starts within and that by tending to ourselves we can show up more truthfully and authentically for others. I learned that expectations and comparisons are the thief of joy. I experienced once more the reality that death will come to all of us – sometimes unexpectedly and always on its own schedule.

I softened into remembering that everything we love we will lose, and in the same breath this is what makes everything so beautiful.

From my heart to yours.

With love,

Nici

Ps. This is one of the only photos I have from the whole weekend but it captures my experience perfectly - quiet moments in a circle of good friends with the magic of angels and liminal beings surrounding us. Could that mystical blur on the screen be my Boppa sitting with us, or perhaps my Mum’s spirit come to collect him?