We have just closed a six-day grief tending and earth medicine retreat nestled amongst 150 hectors of regenerated land in Portugal. Our last guest left this morning and I’m basking in the soft after haze of being cracked open once more by the brave work of grief. Sixteen people arrived as strangers bringing their grief of loved ones, lost dreams, systemic oppression, and a life of unmet longing for entanglement and connection with nature. We departed from our temporary village yesterday as family, in the recognition and mirroring of each other as fellow human hearts walking this path home.
This collaboration programme with Rooted Healing has not only been transformative for the guests, but it has also enlivened something deep and dormant within my own bones – the longing and desire for partnership in this work. It has been beyond beautiful to hold this retreat with my dear friend, sister, soulmate – Roni. She is a true medicine woman, bringing her depth of being to ceremony, song and ritual. She is also a true ally, celebrating and supporting me and this grief tending work. It is a gift to feel held in this work, at this time in history when grief feels more alive than ever before.
It hasn’t been lost on me this week what it’s meant to hold a grief tending retreat at the same moment that collective grief is reaching new levels of pain. It’s isn’t easy to understand how a ceremony halfway across the world can matter for those with nowhere safe to go. Although I don’t understand it with my mind, I know in my heart that this is the only sane response. To gather as a circle of friends – or strangers – and cry our sorrow into the altar. To sit in a circle and meet ourselves fully so that we can remember that we are one humanity.
At one point on the retreat this week I could no longer bear to wear my watch. I only wear it when I’m facilitating anyway, but suddenly the metal felt heavy and the strap was too tight. In that moment I knew that this work was timeless. As I sat witnessing a woman grieve for the death of her baby, I felt the visceral ache in my belly that this is what has been stolen from us – the right to wail and weep and be seen. As I sat with the tenderness of the men in our group when they met their own outrage of what has been done to women – I knew that this is what is needed to heal.
For the first time in a long time, I feel hope. I feel strengthened and softened in equal measure by the capacity of the human heart to feel sorrow and love. I feel inspired by the trust that when we are able to touch the deepest edges of our grief, we will remember our truest place on this earth, which means coming into relationship with one another. We will remember a reciprocity with all of life built on reverence, care, and love. I feel rooted in the mystery that while we might feel helpless, we can lean towards a greater resolve to tend to what is immediately in front of us. We can tend to the river of our own grief so that we will not go numb to another’s.
We spent the last workshop of our grief tending retreat exploring how this experience can ripple out into the collective, as within, so without. Grief work is alchemical. It takes us to the depths of ourselves so that we can fall into the same nothingness from which everything arises. Grief work is fertile. It pulls us down into the darkest of descents so that in the next breath we can rise, different and changed. Grief work is an act of remembering forward. It calls on us to acknowledge and tend to our grief so that we can stoke the fires of our longings and weave a different world for those to come.