The Time Is Here to Grieve

During an artist residency sponsored by the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Sisters of Loretto, and inspired by rich conversation with wise souls, I wrote the following piece.

While still at Loretto, in a sweet little house surrounded by pasture and curious cows, I recorded the poem, which you can listen to below.

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The time is here to grieve. 

The time is here to open up  to change, to loss,  to “I’ve never lived in this world before.”

What do you know?  Practically nothing. 

What do you want?  For the pain to go away. 

 Then you must let it go. 

Holding onto the fear, the hurt, the sorrow,  stuffing them down into your body,  only inflames your being.  

Grasping at what cannot be contained  only exacerbates exhaustion. 

Clinging to the known,  even as it slips away,  only prolongs despair.  

Allow yourself despair.  Let it flow through you,  washing you,  dirty, clean,  wearing away your edges.  Softening. 

You cannot know the next life  while you are clutching.  You cannot see it  if you are only looking backward.  

Look around.  Who is here with you?  Who holds your hand?  The gentle, warm touch  may change nothing  except to remind you  that you are not alone. 

Look ahead.  Do you tremble at the fog?  Do you tense with every  “I don’t know“?  Are you willing to  step forward anyway? 

Look to Mother Earth.  Notice that She is steady  under your feet.  She is all around you,  cradling you.  She will not fall away,  even if you betray Her.  She will sustain you  with her tender-fierce  maternal care. 

If you let her. 

Stomp!  Wail!  

Fall to your knees  in the  relief  of  surrender. 

The time is now to cry.  The cry is now to Time.  

More time!  Mourn time.  

Grief flowing transforms.  Grief stagnant petrifies.  

What do you choose? 

River or fossil?

Allowed to Feel It All

About a week ago I was feeling all the grief, not about COVID-19 (for once), but about having to create a strong boundary with a person I care about. I shared my situation with a couple of people who listened compassionately, but even with their attentiveness, I couldn’t shake it. The grief still wanted to be heard. In the evening I was texting with another friend about it, who told me that I shouldn’t take on someone else’s grief, especially now, that it was even unhealthy to do so. My friend used the analogy that you may have seen by now- we’re all in the same storm, but in different boats. The point my friend was trying to make was that because I wasn’t in the same boat as the person with whom I needed to create the boundary, I shouldn’t have feelings about the other boat.

At that suggestion my grief turned to rage. Rage at the idea that being in the different boats meant I shouldn’t have feelings about the other boats. Rage that the person was telling me that feeling these emotions was unhealthy. Rage that my friend didn’t get that the point of the boat analogy was actually encouraging empathy, connection, and understanding rather than squelching them.

Rage feels a lot more powerful than grief and I was grateful for the energetic change. The conversation  ended shortly after that and I opened Untamed, Glennon Doyle’s latest memoir. I happened to be at the chapter in which Glennon wrote about her heartbreak at learning of immigrant family separations happening at the U.S.-Mexico border and the ways that she responded to that situation. As I read, my rage turned back to grief and then to relief. She understood. I felt heard by a stranger who hadn't actually even heard me. 

Being in different boats doesn’t mean we don’t get to have feelings about the other boats. It also doesn’t mean that if we’ve got a good sturdy boat with room for more people, we just wave at the folks in the leaky canoe. “Sorry about your luck! See ya later!” If we see and can do something, hopefully, we'll do something. That's a topic to explore another day. 

I kept reading. I allowed myself to feel whatever feelings arose.

I am allowed to feel it all. You are allowed to feel it all. 

That night I shed a few tears. I put down my book and I slept well. I woke up feeling lighter because the grief was no longer stuck in me. It had moved through.

Many of us have been taught that some emotions are good (joy, gratitude, relief, hope) and others are bad (loneliness, disgust, anxiety, confusion). Some of the “bad” emotions are even gendered by societal norms. Men can feel angry and express it, but women can’t. Women can feel grief and express it, but men can’t. Then there’s shame. Most of us have been told to feel shame at one time or another (“You should be ashamed of yourself!”), but few of us want to admit to feeling it. It’s too scary. Fear and shame, shame and fear, both are adept at disguising themselves as something else. Often it’s anger. And so we allow some emotions to surface and try to keep others from seeing the light of day. We feel the stress of holding them in our bodies, then we disconnect from both the emotions and our bodies because the accumulation becomes too painful. And...or...at the moment we least expect, all the emotions erupt out of us; we become the storm leaving wreckage behind us.

What if we allowed ourselves to feel more instead of stuffing, denying, numbing? What if we could name the feelings in all their nuance and even recognize when we were experiencing a whole slew of feelings all at once? What if, when someone else told us how they were feeling and it made us uncomfortable, we could both live with our own discomfort and also honor the feelings the other person was having?  

Since I’ve been practicing Compassionate Communication, I’ve gotten in much better touch with my feelings. I notice that they’re happening in the first place. I give myself space to explore them. I allow myself to be with them without judging whether they’re good or bad.

Noticing, honoring, and tending to emotions are practices. They are practices of connecting- to ourselves and each other. I believe these are lifelong practices. May we lean into the spectrum of emotions. May we lean into each other as we tend to them. 

In response to the Mosque Shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand

Friday, March 15, 2019 evening

Twisty-turn stomach. I’m exhausted today because some part of my body wants to cry , to shake with grief over 49 dead and more injured in Christchurch, New Zealand, Facebook live video footage of the attack, manifesto of hate, praise for the president of my country by the shooter. The weight of it all is too heavy.

Another part of my body says, “No, it’s too risky. If you start to grieve, you may never stop. There’s too much. Too much. Too much to grieve. You will drown in it.”

And so I’m tired. My head hurts. My back aches. My throat feels a shrill scream stuck and waiting to escape whenever, however, it can.

This morning I led a Nonviolent Communication practice group session in which we practiced empathetic listening. This was a practice of receiving difficult-to-hear messages and reflecting back with care. Nonviolent Communication invites us, when we hear a message that is difficult, into four steps:

1) to reflect back observations that the speaker may be referring to in order to understand what is evoking the person’s feelings

2) to reflect back what stated or unstated feelings the speaker is expressing

3) to reflect back what needs or values are at the heart of the speaker’s experience, and

4) to seek strategies to meet the need(s) that are causing the speaker pain.

A seemingly simple process.

However, humans are not simple and our actions and the needs beneath them are often unclear. We’ve been taught that our needs aren’t important or that we should ignore them or deny them. We’ve been taught that we “need” a new car or the latest phone or to go to that one restaurant. Those aren’t needs. They’re strategies to meet needs for… autonomy or reliability? Communication or clarity? Adventure or health? Some other needs that every human being experiences?

We are trained not to go deep into our (or others’) feelings. If, by chance, we’ve been taught that we’re “allowed” to have feelings, we are very rarely taught to take the next step, to unearth the needs that are calling for our attention. Instead, we place blame on someone (including possibly ourselves), heap shame, deepen disconnection and discord, while the unspoken and unknown needs remain unspoken, unknown, and unanswered.

Marshall Rosenberg, developed of Nonviolent Communication, said that everything we do is an expression of gratitude for a need met or a “tragic expression of unmet needs.”

Tragic.

Tragic.

Tragic.

What happened in Christchurch was tragic. And my head entertains a question that my heart, holding all its grief for the deceased and their families and friends and for Muslims around the world, is not ready to allow in yet: What were the feelings of a 28-year-old man that led him to enter into two mosques on a Friday afternoon during prayers and shoot dozens of people? What needs was he trying to meet?

I’m not ready to think about what was in that killer’s heart. I’m not ready to wonder what may lie beneath the rage that led to so many deaths. What may lie beneath the rage of others like him.

But after I have grieved with others, felt the love through our collective grief, filled myself with that love that buoys and gives strength to all of us as we live into our interconnection, I will share what I have received by considering these questions that are achingly difficult to consider:

How do we reach those hearts? How do we shower with love those people whose brokenness is so deep or whose shell of protection is so impermeable that they believe breaking others will somehow lead to their own well-being? Can our torrents of gushing tears find them, cleanse them, mend them? How do we even find the will to try when they have caused such destruction?

I hope that the will comes from a desire to express love unconditionally. Hope unconditionally. Curiosity unconditionally. When I am ready, I want to step into these challenging questions that a wise teacher of mine shared:

How much pain would I have to be in in order to do what he or they did? If I walked in his/their shoes, lived his/their life, would I have done exactly the same thing?

Deep within, we are not so different.

How do we honor interconnection not only with the victims, survivors, loved ones, but also the perpetrators?

How do we love them, too?

These questions reside within me and wait for my heart to be open up enough to let them in.