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

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The gate entering “the places that have not known love” was most fascinating for me. Weller calls these “neglected pieces of soul,” the parts of ourselves that we hold in contempt, that we’ve banished into detention centers on the outskirts of who we are. It’s impossible to grieve for something that we feel is “outside our circle of worth.” Again, this is nearly universal. Weller laments that “we live in a society drenched in shame.” Our feelings of worthlessness and self-doubt are legion, much of it due to what he calls “slow trauma,” not dramatic events that happen to us, but all the love and attention that has been withheld. As we come to the end of the sharing, there is a dawning recognition that this is our shared sorrow, the communal cup from which we all drink. It is ours to hold and to gradually empty. We do this together as we enter the healing ground.” Weller: Expressing grief has always been a challenge. The main difference between our society and societies in the past is how private we are with it today. Through most of human history grief has been communal. The Pueblo people of the Southwest, for example, have “crying songs” to help move grief along. The Mohawk traditions have the “condolence ritual,” where they tend to the bereaved with an elegant series of gestures, such as wiping tears from the eyes with the soft skin of a fawn. The healers in those traditions know it is not good to carry grief in the body for a long time. Ritual is a form of direct knowing, something indigenous to the psyche. It has evolved with us, taking knowing into the bone, into our very marrow. I call ritual an embodied process.” Thanks for your book. It's beautiful, clear and says this important thing with great directness and kindness. A fine work." -Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me: Poems

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Silence and solitude allow us to move beyond thought and into our embodied experience. Grief is felt, sensed in the viscera of our bellies, the inner walls of our chests, the curve of our shoulders, the heaviness in our thighs. Grief is registered in our sinews and muscles. It feels laboured, as though a great weight has settled on our chest or a heaviness has entered our bones. We know grief by its felt experience; it is tangible. It is here, in our sighing and sensing body, that we encounter the terrain of sorrow.” Francis Weller is the ultimate grief sage of our time. The Wild Edge of Sorrow marries uncommon compassion with clear-eyed discernment in its invitation to the reader to become a soul activist in a soul-devouring culture. It is a comprehensive manual for conscious grieving and opening to the unprecedented joy and passion that results from embracing our sorrow." - Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., author of Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypseand Collapsing Consciously . 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.” Paradigm shift means creating uplifting alternatives to capitalism and the consumer culture in every way possible. Those individuals and groups who are leading the charge are called upon to share what they are learning. This is not a time to be shy. Grief becomes problematic when the conditions needed to help us work with grief are absent. For example, when we are forced to carry our sorrow in isolation, or when the time needed to fully metabolize the nutrients of a particular loss is denied, and we are pressured to return to “normal” too soon.”

A rich and varied conversation between Michael Lerner, founder and director of Commonweal and Francis Weller, exploring the Long Dark that is emerging in our culture and the planet. ​ While we have much to learn from indigenous cultures about forms of rituals and how ritual works, we cannot simply adopt their rituals and settle them neatly onto our psyches. It is important that we listen deeply, once again, to the dreaming earth and craft rituals that are indigenous to us, that reflect our unique patterns of wounding and disconnection from the land. These rituals will have the potency to mend what has been torn, heal what has been neglected. This is one way that we may return to the land and offer our deepest amends to those we have harmed.”

The Wild Edge of Sorrow Quotes by Francis Weller - Goodreads The Wild Edge of Sorrow Quotes by Francis Weller - Goodreads

One of the themes that has revealed itself on this podcast is that the problems besetting the planet today all stem from our disconnection from the Earth. Celine Lim, an Indigenous Kayan leader from Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo, knows this all too well. Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force.... It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.” 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." Francis Weller is the ultimate grief sage of our time. The Wild Edge of Sorrow marries uncommon compassion with clear-eyed discernment in its invitation to the reader to become a soul activist in a soul-devouring culture. It is a comprehensive manual for conscious grieving and opening to the unprecedented joy and passion that results from embracing our sorrow. Much of our grief comes from having to crouch and live hidden from the gaze of others, and in that posture we confirm our exile. I hear these outcast brothers and sisters every day in my practice. Their numbers are many, and their grief encompasses every aspect of human life. For some, these outcast pieces are connected to their sexuality and bodies; for others, it is their anger or sadness—or their joy and exuberance—that has been banished. For many, it is their needs that were ignored. These outcast portions of soul do not quietly languish at the edges of our awareness; they appear as addictions, depression, or anxiety, calling for our attention. They appear in our dreams as waifs and orphans, in images of ghettos and prison cells. One man, struggling with alcoholism, had a dream that he was walking into a bar, oblivious to a beautiful woman standing there. As he entered, she shouted, “Hey, when are you going to pay attention to me?” Here was his soul calling to him, demanding that he turn and attend to his neglected life.”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.” Most of us instinctively turn from what makes us uncomfortable. Yet often the greatest gifts lie hidden in what we avoid. Certainly at this time we have much to grieve both as individuals and as a culture; but our collective amnesia about the traditional practices of grieving keep us from uncovering the buried treasures that could be our salvation. In fact, the accumulated weight of our ungrieved losses may be at the root of what is fragmenting our world.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sac…

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. I recently interviewed Stephen Jenkinson, known to some as the Griefwalker. In the interview he spoke of the etymology of the word “catastrophe.” The Greek prefix cata, refers to a descent—a going down and inward. “Strophe” is a suffix that is associated with braiding or interweaving a connection. In summary, Jenkinson asserted that this time of “catastrophe” compels us to descend—to go downward rather than soaring; to focus inwardly as much as we pay attention to the external world—and, to do this together in connection and community. For Jenkinson, conscious grieving is a skill that we must develop at this moment of loss and demise. And he further concludes that our work is to open to the descent together and to create communities of individuals who are practicing the skill of grieving for ourselves and for the Earth. 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.” 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: Most of us instinctively turn from what makes us uncomfortable. Yet often the greatest gifts lie hidden in what we avoid. Certainly at this time we have much to grieve both as individuals and as a culture; but our collective amnesia about the traditional practices of grieving keep us from uncovering the buried treasures that could be our salvation. In fact, the accumulated weight of our ungrieved losses may be at the root of what is fragmenting our world."I am not suggesting that we live a life preoccupied with sorrow. I am saying that our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us, our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness, condemns us to a life shadowed by grief. Welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. This is the secret to being fully alive.”