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Your Grief is an Honouring

Words by VERONICA STANWELL

Founder of Rooted Healing and MSc Researcher in Animism, Ceremony + Psilocybin

Autumn is here. The sea is growing colder. Yesterday, a seal came close to investigate our bare bodies taking a brave dip. The seasonal shift was felt in our bones during a recent retreat with The Grief Space. Nici and I held space together again, this time at Erth Barton, where two rivers snake around and join into one, forming the feeling of inhabiting an island, with a crumbling, humble 12th century chapel atop an ancient stone mill.  A space of praise, sorrow and joy that—surrounded by such expansive water—surely predates the Normans.  We felt pagan roots. 

The rawness and bareness of grief makes it wild, untameable, alive; it cannot be moulded to a monoculture. As Francis Weller says, grief “resists the demands to remain passive and still”.  Welcoming grief is one of the keys to welcoming our own wildness.  Grief brings us up against the edge of full aliveness.  It ripens us.  It stretches our experience into wider landscapes. It composts the noise of the overculture and strips us to the core of our being.  And through the cracks of the broken concrete, seeds germinate, flora rises, life fills itself anew.  In this sense, grief makes us good soil for whatever is coming next.

Ancient cultures have long known this, with spaciousness and reverence around the deep journey through grief, and an understanding that the ones who move through the initiation of mourning become the best elders for the village.

This life depends on rupture— thrives in places where edges meet.

And yet so often, we want to curl into the comfort

of the static—as if this would save us from being part of everything—as if this would save us from the torrent of time carving us into new shapes

we have never seen before.

— Laura Weaver

The words for grief and praise are the same in the Tz'utujil language because you can only grieve what you have dearly loved. 

And perhaps this works in the other direction too: If we do not grieve in modern society, we lose our capacity for praise and love.  A numbed heart loses its connection within the family of things. To tend to our grief is to reclaim a wild reverence for this existence in all its breadth and Beauty.

There was something radical about creating a grief ritual in an ancient chapel together, with an array of pillars and candles, flowers and peaceful spaciousness.  We could feel the hundreds and hundreds of years of human hearts stirring and tending in this place.  And to reclaim a place of praise for all who long to sit at an altar of their grief—to reclaim spaces of worship for all people of all creeds—feels vital.

As everyone, one by one, placed their items on the grief altar, tears flowed in what felt like one of the most beautiful honourings I have ever experienced.  In those tears, I felt the sheer breadth of love the human heart is capable of.  I was reminded of Cole Arthur Riley’s quote:

Grief is an honouring.

It really is.  An honouring of your love.  Of life.  Of all that tears us open to the mysteries of this existence.

Haley Frances joined us at our Earth Medicine Grief Tending retreat earlier this year. She’s a poet and poetry therapist from Birmingham. Hayley shares intimately about her losses, her grief, and her profound insights from the retreat in our recent podcast epsiode (listen on Spotify or iTunes or wherever you listen).

Our online course Deepen Your Roots moves through a slow spiral of Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects, where we root in gratitude and, from there, tend to our grief for the world. And rising through fertile soils of this honouring, we remember how to praise, how to love, how to show up.

“In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world and to believe that praising them is our noblest calling.”

— Joanna Macy

Moving through Macy’s spiral for a whole year has made some things very clear for us… one being how needed grief tending is.   Such depth has opened through this incredible group of people.

Registration is open as we call in next year’s slow-rooting ones.  We truly believe in the potency of this work together. And whether you circle with us or not, go out into the world and let your grief be known. It is an honouring of all that you love. Let it open you to this life. Let it carve you into new shapes that you have never seen before.

You can listen to Veronica and guests share on similar themes on the Rooted Healing podcast.

An embodied exploration of belonging and becoming, weaving deep ecology, culture and spirituality.

Save your spot on our pivotal year-long slow study.

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