Wild Edge of Sorrow

This book helped me to understand that some of the frustration and sadness I feel in life is not stress, or depression, or some sort of chemical imbalance - but unacknowledged and unexplored grief - within myself, passed down from my ancestors, grief absorbed from the world around me.

On Grief

“To feel sorrow is to float on the pulse of the earth, the surge from living to dying. Maybe this is why the earth has the power over time to wash sorrow into a deeper pool, cold and shadowed. And maybe this is why, even though sorrow never disappears, it can make a deeper connection to the currents of life and so connect, somehow, to sources of wonder and solace.” - Kathleen Dean Moore.

Grief, unacknowledged, results in an unlived life…

“It was through the dark waters of grief that I came to touch my unlived life…”

The Wild Edge of Sorrow asks us to normalize and explore grief…

“Grief offers a wild alchemy that transmutes suffering into fertile ground.”

and to speak about and share that grief with others who can support us.

“Hold your sorrow to a degree of eloquence, whereby everyone around you will be fed by your efforts to do so…

In community and ritual, we can take away from grief the rich lessons and resiliency it provides.

“The process of being seen, understood, and accepted by an attuned, empathic other engenders a sense of genuine self-acceptance. Bonding and belonging nourish resilience…”

It took me a long time to recognize that what I experience as anger was actually grief.

“What is often diagnosed as depression is actually low-grade chronic grief locked into the psyche, complete with the ancillary ingredients of shame and despair. Martín Prechtel calls this the gray-sky culture,72 one in which we do not choose to live an exuberant life, filled with the wonder of the world and the beauty of day-to-day existence.”

This grief was centered around behavior patterns and themes that Weller might explain as complexes.

“Complexes are bundles of concentrated emotional energy formed when we were confronted with an experience too intense for us to successfully digest. When the complex appears, we are taken out of the present moment and situated back into our histories at the point of the trauma. Pulled out of the present, we cannot adequately deal with such hardships, too overwhelmed by the seeming reality of the moments of injury.”

My response was to bottle things up and put on a happy face. But inside, I felt hollow. I resorted to a sort of nihilism - that life has no rhyme or reason, we all die, and then there is nothing.

“Nearly every day in my practice, someone speaks to this feeling of hollowness. And I think, how good to name it, to keep it in front of us, instead of having it trail behind us, pulling us away from others and from life. Facing our emptiness is key to our freedom. Until we do, we are driven by lifelong patterns of avoidance.”

So how to deal with grief appropriately? The answer, according to Weller, is to engage in ritual - a concept which our ancestors understood well, but which we have begun to forget.

“Grief is subversive, undermining our society’s quiet agreement that we will behave and be in control of our emotions…”

The Mayans believed in a sacramental cosmos where life feeds on life - that we all carry a deep spiritual debt for what we are given, which we can never fully repay, but which we can honor with ritual.

Weller describes an ancient Scandinavian tradition where, if a community member was grieving the loss of a loved one, little was expected of them for a year or more.

“This sacred season in the ashes was the ancient Scandinavian community’s way of acknowledging that one of their people had entered a world parallel to but separate from the daily life of gathering food, feeding children, and tending fields.”

Today we rarely give ourselves this time. We press onward, pull ourselves up by our boot straps, and never fully acknowledge what we have lost. As a result “survivors aren’t allowed sufficient time to grieve, however, the wounds close too soon, remain infected and never heal…”

One form of grief is a lack of self acceptance.

“What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth…”

When we don’t accept our full selves, we often conform to what we think others will accept. Weller calls this “premature death”, adapting a pattern of ambivalence.

“Herein begins the slow, insidious process of carving up the self to fit into the world of adults. We become convinced that our joy, sadness, needs, sensuality, and so forth are the cause of our unacceptability, and we are more than willing to cleave off portions of our psychic life for the sake of inclusion…”

Pressure to conform for scant reward, and/or threats of marginalization because of one’s beliefs, says Weller, may force an individual to attempt to assimilate into the least layer of culture, thereby causing one’s relationship to all things to slowly become defective.

Seen from an indigenous perspective, the grief we experience at this gate is a form of soul loss, a condition that occurs when the desire for life—the feeling of being alive—becomes so blunted that death becomes appealing and depression a way of life.

The antidote to this, according to Weller, is threefold:

To recognize that we are wounded.
To find compassion for ourselves.
To move from silence to sharing.

Here, Weller points out that grief does not have to be the result of trauma. It can result from a feeling of absence, which Weller calls “slow trauma”. That “absence” can be as simple as feeling like the gifts with which we bring to the world are going unacknowledged - a pain personally that felt so good to hear acknowledged. I’ve had what I think most people would consider a very cushioned life, experiencing none of the trauma that many of those close to me felt. I do feel blessed, and gifted - so why am I sad? Why am I angry? Why do I feel so alone?

Weller writes:

“Deep in our bones lies an intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community. But without a village to reflect back to us that we are valued, these ruptures are interpreted in silence…”

Community can immediately acknowledge, reflect back, and diminish our pain - keeping our wounds superficial, keep them from festering.

We need to recover our right to ask for help in grief, otherwise it will continue to recycle perpetually. Grief has never been private; it has always been communal.

But for the longest time, I ignored community. I tried to be self reliant, and independent, career-driven. And in that process of “earning a living”, I ignored my innate gifts, the things that made me feel alive in the first place.

“This reduction in vitality and vividness induces a smoldering rage…We often feel flattened under the weight of domestication, which smothers the heat and howl of our wild selves.”

Part of that wildness, Weller says, is the age old bond between humans and the natural world.

“Parts of you aren’t even human, they’re part mammal, part reptile, part rose, part moon, part wind. And life is a question of which parts are dominant—which, in effect, possess you…”

I love this idea, that humans are not just one species of animal, but that we each possess some unique blend of the spirit and essence of other animals. As such, part of the grief that they experience, we experience. When the planet is wounded, it is only natural that we feel some of that within ourselves.

Wellers says that we also experience the unaddressed pain passed down from our ancestors.

“The stoic façade and behaviors of these generations left behind a legacy of unattended pain…”

As someone from a very stoic family, where hard, uncomfortable topics weren’t often discussed, and pain, shame, and past grievances were not openly shared, this resonated for me, and helped to explain some of my lack of sense of place.

“In a very real way, we have lost our connection to the land, language, imagination, rituals, songs, and stories of our ancestors and, because of this, we feel homeless…”

…and the crucial need to do something about it.

“There is no gesture of kindness that is wasted, no offering of compassion that is useless. We can be generous to every sorrow we see. It is sacred work.”

or as Joanna Macy wrote, “The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.”

On Ritual

Ritual offers us the two things required to fully let go of the grief we carry: containment and release. The urge to create rituals is innate within us, and when it is ignored, we result to patterns of addiction, compulsion, or routines lacking the renewal that genuine ritual provides.

Ritual serves several functions, according to Weller.

Silence and Solitude

The first function of ritual is to enable us to “become transparent to the transcendent.” - to open ourselves up to change, to break down the barriers we constructed to protect ourselves - to come to an “annihilated place” in which we can start to rebuild, and “ripen our sorrow into something dense and giving to the world.” Spiritualist Malidoma Somé (whose literature I’ve written about previously) calls ritual the “anti-machine”.

This transparency requires silence and solitude. Silence invites us into a space of deep listening, a form of worship, and a place of humility from which we can change. Silence is an act of protest against the breathless pace at which we live our lives, and solitude is necessary to bring about the desire for kinship. As poet David Whyte writes, “we are found by the world in the place of our aloneness.”

Reparation

Secondly, there is a reparative function to ritual.

Carl Jung suggested that change rested upon three principles: insight, endurance, and action.

Insight, it’s impoortant to note, may not come quickly. It can take months or years in a period of reflection in order to reveal a newness of thinking that can result in change.

Endurance “asks us to keep the insight in front of us—to think about it, write about it, mull it over, draw it, dance it, talk about it with a close friend.”

Acceptance

The third function is to invite the denied and forgotten aspects of our psyche to show up.

Ritual provides something else that we deeply need: a level of witnessing that allows us to feel seen. This vulnerability in front of others can be hard, but Weller suggests taking small risks in the arena of ritual so that we can begin to build faith in ourselves.

Weller tells a story of a patient, a scientist, who comes seeking to get over the sadness of losing a loved one. “What are the steps?” he asks, hoping for a an easy formula. “I don’t think it will end” Weller tells him. “Your grief is your new relationship with your wife. It will be the ongoing reminder of your love and life together, and your sadness will keep her in your world.”

We face many “little deaths”, and their purpose is to bring loss and death into the midst of our lives. By keeping our vulnerability and mortality close, we learn to meet each moment with presence, even as we know it is passing away.

Weller outlines a framework for acceptance which consists of 3 steps:

Dying before we die - experiencing and connecting with the “little deaths” of our life to prepare us for our own death. This realization invites us to live fully now.
Befriending darkness - learning to “see in the dark” - gaining an aptitude for sensitivity in confronting grief and vulnerability. Connecting to “the quiet thrum of nature moving through our senses and the body of the earth.”

“When death finds you, make sure it finds you alive” - African Proverb.

Learning to let go - Every loss, personal or shared, prepares us for our own time of leaving.

Being Good Ancestors

Many native american cultures intuitively understand the need for restraint, reciprocity and respect with nature. They viewed it as basic as having good manners. If we consider our outsized impact on the world, and come to terms with our own limited time as a species here, then it makes the decision to do whatever we can for those species that remain to mitigate against further damage. We have to remember that much of the grief that we are feeling isn’t ours. It isn’t personal. We are literally feeling the sorrows of the world.