Your grief is an honouring

With special guest - Veronica Stanwell

One of the greatest gifts I've received from offering grief tending over the years is the depth of friendship that has grown amongst the facilitators I work with. Holding space with others is enriching, nourishing and inspiring, as well as sometimes vulnerable, edgy and challenging. There is nowhere to hide amongst the wild combination of long days, swimming in deep emotional waters and navigating the beautiful but unpredictable nature of a retreat.

Apart from holding space with my beloved Charlie, who I may embarrass by talking about in another newsletter, my deepest ongoing collaboration is with my dear sister– Veronica Stanwell from Rooted Healing, known to many as Roni.

Roni and I met birthing our drums with Dorrie Joy. I was in awe of her, this beautiful, wise, steady sister with the voice of an angel and deep ancestral knowledge of the arts. I was shy at first, still in my own process of knowing my worth and feeling 'less than' around other soulful sisters. But luckily for me, Roni was direct in staying in touch, and a few months later, I was the very first guest on her now thriving podcast, Rooted Healing.

Looking back, it was a courtship, a meeting of souls. There is so much written about romantic love, even about friendship love, but what about the love that forms between two people who show up in service together? On our retreat this year in Portugal, there was a moment during the grief ritual when I felt that Roni and I had been doing this together for lifetimes. Circling and weaving around each other, holding different skills, offering a different heart but in service to the whole.

A few weeks ago, Roni wrote a newsletter about her experience co-facilitating our Grief Alchemy retreat at Erth Barton in Cornwall. Here I share with you her words, her honouring, her remembering.

With love, Nici

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Words by Veronica Stanwell

Autumn is here. The sea is growing colder. Yesterday, a seal came close to investigate our bare bodies taking a brave dip. The seasonal shift was felt in our bones during a recent retreat with The Grief Space. Nici and I held space together again, this time at Erth Barton, where two rivers snake around and join into one, forming the feeling of inhabiting an island, with a crumbling, humble 12th century chapel atop an ancient stone mill.  A space of praise, sorrow and joy that—surrounded by such expansive water—surely predates the Normans.  We felt pagan roots.

The rawness and bareness of grief makes it wild, untameable, alive; it cannot be moulded to a monoculture. As Francis Weller says, grief “resists the demands to remain passive and still”.  Welcoming grief is one of the keys to welcoming our own wildness.  Grief brings us up against the edge of full aliveness.  It ripens us.  It stretches our experience into wider landscapes. It composts the noise of the overculture and strips us to the core of our being.  And through the cracks of the broken concrete, seeds germinate, flora rises, life fills itself anew.  In this sense, grief makes us good soil for whatever is coming next.

Ancient cultures have long known this, with spaciousness and reverence around the deep journey through grief, and an understanding that the ones who move through the initiation of mourning become the best elders for the village.

This life depends on rupture— thrives in places where edges meet.

And yet so often, we want to curl into the comfort

of the static—as if this would save us from being part of everything—as if this would save us from the torrent of time carving us into new shapes

we have never seen before.

— Laura Weaver

The words for grief and praise are the same in the Tz'utujil language because you can only grieve what you have dearly loved.  And perhaps this works in the other direction too: If we do not grieve in modern society, we lose our capacity for praise and love.  A numbed heart loses its connection within the family of things. To tend to our grief is to reclaim a wild reverence for this existence in all its breadth and Beauty.

There was something radical about creating a grief ritual in an ancient chapel together, with an array of pillars and candles, flowers and peaceful spaciousness.  We could feel the hundreds and hundreds of years of human hearts stirring and tending in this place.  And to reclaim a place of praise for all who long to sit at an altar of their grief—to reclaim spaces of worship for all people of all creeds—feels vital.

As everyone, one by one, placed their items on the grief altar, tears flowed in what felt like one of the most beautiful honourings I have ever experienced.  In those tears, I felt the sheer breadth of love the human heart is capable of.  I was reminded of Cole Arthur Riley’s quote:

Grief is an honouring.

It really is.  An honouring of your love.  Of life.  Of all that tears us open to the mysteries of this existence.

“In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world and to believe that praising them is our noblest calling.” — Joanna Macy

Rooted Healing’s year-long programme Deepen Your Roots starts 1^st February. Join us for a life changing slow study through embodied animistic deep ecology. You can use the code: THEGRIEFSPACE10 for 10% off.