I am sick. It started Thursday and seems to come and go. I am on the quil. I just got back from a walk, for a few blocks I felt great, and by the time I got home I was ready for a nap. Maybe after this.
It is a Saturday. No one has reached out. I don't have any major plans -though I had a desire to go to a protest at 3 downtown Minneapolis. Don't think I'll make it. In some ways this was the best weekend to get sick since I didn't have anything.
I am reading a book called The Wild Edge of Sorrow about grief. Its one of those books that you pick up, read some, and put down for a few days. I keep having a desire to read it, but when it is time I choose my phone and distraction instead.
The reason I want to read it is really clear. Its speaking to my soul and my heart. At times my mind wanders when reading it, wanders to work and clients, wanders to old relationships, wanders to distraction... but my heart and my soul want this level of richness.
In the premise of the book is basically that grief is a huge part of the soul/human journey and that we in our culture have basically pushed it away -and thereby banished whole parts of ourselves. It is a trauma in itself that we don't acknowledge grief very well. The author then breaks down the types of grief we experience (5 gates) and their entry way leads to a vast sorrow -that is natural and necessary to process in order to live more fully. He breaks it down as:
1) Everything we love, we lose (grief of loss)
2) The places that have not known love (grief of exiled or shamed parts)
3) The sorrows of the world (societal and climate loss)
4) What we expected and did not receive (unmet needs / including those that should be natural to society)
5) Ancestral Grief (intergenerational trauma/grief).
The gates of 2,4,5 really struck me. I know 1 and 3 also hit me, but I think I am more frequently able to acknowledge and name these kinds of losses. When I watch the news, 3 hits me every time. When I think of the past, 1 hits me.... but naming shame as grief, naming unmet needs as grief... naming generational patterns and the impacts of generational trauma as grief is really helpful.
Grief means there is a mix of emotions, rather than just trauma (fear and avoidance), grief says step into this... trauma says run.
I am probably not able to do this right now... but just the idea of saying who would you be if you let shame go? If you acknowledged that your guilt/shame is actually a transmission from the past and you can honor it by healing, rather than feeling exiled? That your loneliness and sorrow are not a personal defect, but rather the impacts of a society that has lost its way... and really mean these things.
I am probably not in the headspace to be able to fully do that thinking/feeling right now. But I think this might be my next step. I think I need to imagine, to let go, to stop holding on to anchors that don't serve me.
I was walking to subway and saw someone who had M's stature, and thought... man it would be really good to let go of my shame, guilt, hurt. To just say sorry and move forward without worrying.
Of course, the author of this book, who invites us into a new recognition and ritual, has also been accused of misusing his power... There is a place of mistrust and anger and hurt and desire to exile...
Maybe I'll add to all of this when I wake up from my nap.
