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Drinking the Tears of the World:
Grief as Deep Activism

by Francis Weller

At a recent gathering that combined writing practice and grief work, we asked those attending what brought them there. Their responses revealed a powerful mixture of personal and collective sorrow, with most every one speaking to the feelings they were carrying for the state of the world. The specific focus of their grief varied, but the consensus was it was clear we are carrying great sorrow for the sufferings of our planet.

The weekend made it obvious to all of the participants that we need regular avenues to allow the accumulated grief of our lives to be released. Our personal losses must be weighed with dignity, with compassion, and shared. It is essential that we do not measure our losses against the world's, setting up comparisons that make our individual sorrows less important. Our ability to receive our own grief opens the gateway for our communal compassion.

What has become clear is the powerful role grief plays in enabling us to face what is taking place in our communities, our ecologies, families, nations, etc. What I mean by that is that grief is a powerful emotion capable of keeping the edges of the heart pliable, flexible, fluid, and open to the world, and as such, becomes a potent support for any form of activism we may intend to take, indeed is itself a vital form of soul activism.

It is absolutely essential that we address issues of the heart in considering our responses to life. The heartless overtures tossed about with reckless abandon in our political world, reveals what is possible when matters of the heart are neglected.

Grief is part of the great ecology of the soul. In many cultures, grief is considered toxic to humans, thus the importance of releasing it, while it is recognized as food for the other world. Our grieving affirms life. It is a profound declaration of interdependence; that someone or something has penetrated my heart, and my grief is my acknowledgement of that love. The background wash of grief we feel when we stand still for a moment is testament to the fact that the world itself has made its way into our hearts.

This reality crashed into my consciousness at a ritual we were doing called, “Renewing the World.” The first night of the ritual was designed to acknowledge everything that is leaving or has already left the world the green ones, the animals, friends, family, magic, whatever we could name was to be placed into a funeral pyre for us to grieve over. I was leading the ritual but immediately after the last words of the invocation had left my mouth, I was on my knees weeping, wailing, gasping. For four hours we held vigil naming the lost and disappearing cultures, languages, children, grizzlies, and every piece uttered held a resonance in my body. Without any conscious awareness, these were my relations that were dying and suffering. That thin veil of difference that somehow insulates me from the others was shredded and the truth of our inter connectedness came rushing into my awareness through the grace of grief.

Many of us face challenges however, when we approach grief. The most noted obstacle perhaps, is that we live in a flat line culture, one that avoids the depths of emotions. Consequently, those feelings that rumble deep in our souls as grief get congested there, rarely finding a positive expression such as through a grief ritual. As Rilke said in his moving grief poem, “I don't have much knowledge yet in grief--so this massive darkness makes me small.” Our twenty-four hour a day culture keeps the presence of grief shunted to the background as we stand in the brightly lit areas of what is familiar and comfortable. It was so moving to see firsthand while visiting my son in New York City in October 2001, the spontaneous outpouring of grief in shrines throughout the city and rituals being performed in parks. It was as if the soul had an absolute need to work the ground of sorrow in order for healing to begin.

This collective denial of our underlying emotional life has contributed to an array of troubles and symptoms. What is often diagnosed as depression is actually low-grade chronic grief locked into the psyche complete with all the ancillary ingredients of shame and despair. Martín Prechtel calls this the “gray sky” culture, in that we do not choose to live an exuberant life, filled with the wonder of the world, the beauty of day to day existence, or welcome the sorrow that comes with the inevitable losses that accompany us on our walk through our time here. This refusal to enter the depths has consequently shrunk the visible horizon for many of us, dimmed our enthusiastic participation in the joys and sorrows of the world.

There are other factors at work that obscure the free and unfettered expression of grief. Conditioned deeply in the western psyche is the notion of private pain. This ingredient predisposes us to maintaining a lock on our grief, shackling it into the smallest concealed place in our soul. In our solitude, we are deprived of the very things we require to stay emotionally vital: community, ritual, nature, compassion, reflection, beauty and love. Private pain is a legacy of individualism. In this narrow story the soul is imprisoned and literalized, forced into a fiction that severs its kinship with the earth, with sensuous reality and the myriad wonders of the world. This itself is a source of grief for many of us. As Rilke said, “Ah, not to feel cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner – what is it? if not intensified sky hurled though with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.”

Another facet of our aversion to grief is fear. I have heard hundreds of times in my practice as a therapist, how fearful people are of dropping into the well of grief. The most frequent comment is “If I go there, I’ll never return.” What I found myself saying to this was rather surprising. “If you don’t go there, you’ll never return.” It seems that our wholesale abandonment of this core emotion has cost us dearly, pressed us towards the surface where we live superficial lives and feel the gnawing ache of something missing. Our return to the richly textured life of soul and the soul of the world must pass through the intense region of grief and sorrow.

William Blake said, "The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy." When we send our grief into exile we simultaneously condemn our lives to an absence of joy. This gray sky existence is intolerable to the soul. It shouts at us daily to do something about this, but in the absence of meaningful measures to respond or from the sheer terror of entering the terrain of grief naked, we turn instead to distraction, addiction or anesthesia.

Coming home to grief is sacred work, a powerful practice that confirms what the indigenous soul knows and what spiritual traditions teach: we are connected to one another. Our fates are bound together in a mysterious but recognizable way. Grief registers the many ways this depth of kinship is assaulted daily. Grief becomes a core element in any peacemaking practice as it is a central means whereby our compassion is quickened, our mutual suffering is acknowledged.

Grief is the work of mature men and women. It is our responsibility to source this emotion and offer it back to our struggling world. The gift of grief is the affirmation of life and of our intimacy with the world. It is risky to stay vulnerable in a culture increasingly dedicated to death, but without our willingness to stand witness through the power of our grief, we will not be able to stem the hemorrhaging of our communities, the senseless destruction of ecologies or the basic tyranny of monotonous existence. Each of these moves pushes us closer to the edge of the wasteland, a place where malls and cyberspace become our daily bread and our sensual lives diminish. Grief instead, stirs the heart, is indeed the song of a soul alive.

Grief is, as has been said, a powerful form of deep activism. If we refuse or neglect the responsibility for drinking the tears of the world, her losses and deaths cease to be registered by the ones meant to be the receptors of that information. It is our job to feel these losses and to mourn them. It is our job to openly grieve for the loss of wetlands, the destruction of forest systems, the decay of whale populations, the erosion of soil, and on and on. We know the litany of loss but we have collectively neglected our response to this emptying of our world. We need to see and participate in grief rituals in every part of this country. Imagine the power of our voices and tears being heard across the continent. I believe the wolves and coyotes would howl with us, the cranes, egrets and owls would screech, the willows would bend closer to the ground. Together the great transforming could happen to us and our great grief cry could happen to the worlds beyond. May it be so.

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