Honoring Grief: Art Making for the Revolution
The grief of the last few years is palpable all around us. Of the last few decades. Centuries. Of the ancestors and legacies that live through us. It lays heavy within and shapes the world inside and around us. Most of us have no tools or pathways to relate to grief. So instead it grows louder even as we turn away, hoping for it to be quiet. Finished.
Grief is not linear. Nor predictable. It is both decidedly unmappable, wild, and alive - as otherworldly and transcendant. The edge of a place we can not know. It is not something we cannot map out or contain. Grief contains us.
Grief asks us what it means to love. To be alive. It asks us to let the furthest reaches of our heart and spirit be revealed to us. The places that hold loss, anguish, and despair. Places that without the careful support of community, pathways, spirit, ritual, or something beyond us can be extinguishing of our own aliveness.
These last few years have held a vast escalation of grief for many. Those of us who had the privilege to be shielded from many of the larger impacts of the intersecting pillars of colonization, imperialism, and white supremacy (and all they contain within them) began to witness clearly. And those of us who were most affected by the larger impacts of these began to finally be seen, listened to, and witnessed nationally, globally. So many lives were taken by Covid, oppressive governmental actions, police brutality, and multiple, ongoing genocides. Most of our lives have been changed forever.
How do we hold this?
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Grief Rituals
As a white person, I was raised with a deep disconnection to grief and grieving rituals. Grieving wasn't something you did. Feeling sadness and loss were acceptable, but they were just feelings. They were supposed to come and go with the ease of tears. Maybe once or twice after a loss. Then you moved on.
I remember in my early 20's I spent a year wearing all black. I have always loved lots of color so this was a distinct choice. But I chose to do that as a way to honor all the grief I felt and had no way to express. I would say I was grieving for my life, when asked. But really I was grieving for life - all life - and the absence and destruction of it in what I saw all around me.
I was coming into my self while recognizing none of the containers I needed to grow and transform in my life were available. Recognizing that this country is driven by colonization, white supremacy, violent oppression, capitalism, individualism, power over, war, and violence. I didn't have the words or the capacity to put it all together yet in a way that made sense, and no one around me had a path I could follow. So I wore black. And mourned through the only path I could find.
Art , Spirit, and Grief
As I grew I retained this commitment to grieving. Without grieving, how can we truly make space for love, and joy, and connection? We need to be able to honor the spirit of what we've lost if we are to have capacity for the spirit that is here and is yet to come. I found my rituals in nature. My community in the QT ancestors and lineages of healers and artists. My path through writing and poetry, acting, singing and movement.
Music held the vocalizations of grief - sound waves of emotion flowing from and through my body. Acting held ritualized characters that embodied that gave voice and expression to my own grief. Spoken word poetry opened portals to ancestral grief, intergenerational grief, traumatic grief, and the grief of witnessing. Dance held the body in grief - the waves of emotion moved through me. And nature held the place to breathe, release, and come home. The earth to welcome my feet, and the waves to flow gently through me. The sky to remember vastness, and the forest to remember community. The sun to remember that all life passes, and the moon to remember the beauty in life after it has passed.
These were the rituals that held me. What are the rituals that can hold you?
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Photo by cocarinne on Pexels.com
Prompts
This week I invite you to explore the following prompts related to honoring grief. The loss that speaks of love and aliveness. Honoring the grief that honors us in its expression. Waves of the ocean that without care may drown us, but with care may carry us ever, home.
I invite you to explore the following questions. You may want to practice journaling, song and sound healing, art or craft work, food preparation and offerings, movement practices, connecting in nature - or whatever feels right for you:
What messages have you received about grief? From those that raised you? Schooling? Religion? Community? From media?
What does colonization and white supremacy teach about grief and grieving? How do these beliefs serve to uphold and maintain these systems? How does this impact us?
What ancestral or community practices do you know of that held and supported grief - blood lineage or identity lineage? If you had access to these practices, what happens within you when you embody them? If your access has been taken or blocked, how has this lack affected you?
Asking your body - how do you feel called to relate to grief in this time, in this place, in this body? What of your ancestral lineage or community practices can you draw from to support this? What does not align? And what of your own intuition and knowing can integrate with this?
Further Support
Next week I'll be starting a new practice to these blog posts. On the last blog post of each month, I will share an art piece to respond to. This may be something I've made, or something I've found that speaks to me. Your invitation will be to create your own piece in response to the piece I share. Look for next week's post for more info.
As always, if you would like individual support on your healing journey as a joy-full, radical empath, intuitive, or sensitive, I am here for you. Please reach out. Additionally, you are welcome to join the waitlist for Soul Sanctuary, my new ecospiritual and expressive arts group for LGBTTSQIA empaths, intuitives, and magic makers on the path to liberation. As a queer, enby, intuitive therapist, I deeply understand the challenges of this journey. I would be honored to support you.
In Healing and Justice,
Phoenix