"This book, then, is an act of remembrance through which our eternal connection to animals and plants, rivers and hills, trees and clouds can be reawakened. It is a gesture of protest, calling us back to a life of connection and intimacy, of feeling and wonder. It is an invitation to feed the fires of our aliveness and coax us back to life. All this comes to us through the providence of grief."
I wrote this book for a number of reasons, most notably, to restore soul to grief work and grief to soul work. I feel grief has been colonized by the clinical world, taken hostage by diagnoses and pharmaceutical regimes. For the most part, grief is not a problem to be solved, not a condition to be medicated, but a deep encounter with an essential experience of being human. Grief becomes problematic when the conditions needed to help us work with grief are absent. For example, when we are forced to carry our sorrow in isolation, or when the time needed to fully metabolize the nutrients of a particular loss is denied, and we are pressured to return to “normal” too soon. We are told to “get on with it” and “get over it.” The lack of courtesy and compassion surrounding grief is astonishing, reflecting an underlying fear and mistrust of this basic human experience. We must restore the healing ground of grief. We must find the courage, once again, to walk its wild edge.
Grief is always, in some way, accompanying us. There are times when the presence of sorrow is acute: a partner dies, a home turns to ash in a fire, a marriage dissolves and we find ourselves alone. These seasons in our lives are intense and require a prolonged time to honor what the soul needs, to fully digest the grief. Sorrow is a sustained note in the song of being alive. To be human is to know loss in its many forms. This should not be seen as a depressing truth. Acknowledging this reality enables us to find our way into the grace that lies hidden in sorrow. We are most alive at the threshold between loss and revelation; every loss ultimately opens the way for a new encounter.
In turn, by restoring grief to soul work, we are freed from our one-dimensional obsession with emotional progress. This “psychological moralism” places enormous pressure on us to always be improving, feeling good, and rising above our problems. Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling that we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard. This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld, where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coated in a mantle of shame. People in my practice routinely apologize for their tears or for feeling sad.
I am an advocate for a soul psychology that senses vitality in every emotion, whatever life offers to us in the moment. We will have times of being happy, which is cause for celebration. We will, however, also have times of sorrow and loneliness. Moods will come upon us and events will occur that evoke anger and outrage in us. In fact, archetypal psychologist James Hillman once noted that being outraged is a sure sign that our soul is awake. Each of these emotions and experiences has vitality in it, and that is our work: to be alive and to be a good host to whoever arrives at the door of our house. Happiness, then, becomes a reflection of our ability to hold complexity and contradiction, to stay fluid and accept whatever arises, even sorrow.
I also wrote this book to address the two primary sins of Western civilization: amnesia and anesthesia—we forget and we go numb. These two sins account for an amazing range of sorrows. When we are lost in what author Daniel Quinn calls The Great Forgetting, we slip into a mode of being that neglects the wider bonds of our belonging. We forget that we are all tangled together in this nest of life, that the air we breathe is shared, as is our water and soil, and that everything is bound together in a seamless web of life. When we forget, we are able to do untold damage to our watersheds, to one another, and to the entire earth.
Modern technological society has forgotten what it feels like to be embedded in a living culture, one rich with stories and traditions, rituals and patterns of instruction that help us become true human beings. We live in a society with little regard for matters of soul. As a consequence, we need books and workshops on grief, on relationships and sexuality, on play and creativity. These are symptoms of a great loss. We have forgotten the commons of the soul—the primary satisfactions that sustained and nourished the community and the individual for tens of thousands of years. We have substituted a strange, frenzied obsession with “earning a living”—one of the most obscene phrases in our world—for the vital and fragrant life of the soul. We have sadly turned the ritual of life into the routine of existence. This forgetting has reduced the arc of our experience down to its tiniest hub. The wider reach of our beings has faded, and the subtle and nuanced gravity of contact with the world has been diminished. This is heartbreaking!
Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “What we cannot speak about, we pass over in silence.”We have forgotten the primary language of grief. As a consequence, the terrain of sorrow has become unfamiliar and estranged, leaving us confused, frightened, and lost when grief comes near. The haunting silence that Wittgenstein speaks of lingers as a fog over our lives, placing large areas of experience outside of our reach. When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.
Our strategies of anesthesia are equally astonishing. Entire industries have emerged to keep the senses dulled and distracted. Our need to be anesthetized is rooted in our smoldering dissatisfaction with the meager existence we have been offered by this society, itself a profound source of grief. We suffer from what the poet William Blake called “divine discontent.” Our soul knows we are designed for a bigger, more sensuous, and more imaginative life. But we can go for days, weeks, months, a lifetime with only marginal encounters with beauty and the wild, only rarely sharing an intimate moment with a friend. We collude in the numbing as well, slipping into the void through alcohol, drugs, shopping, television, and work, anything to help us ward off the feelings of emptiness that come crashing at our door.
We were not meant to live shallow lives, pocked by meaningless routines and the secondary satisfactions of happy hour. We are the inheritors of an amazing lineage, rippling with memories of life lived intimately with bison and gazelle, raven and the night sky. We are designed to encounter this life with amazement and wonder, not resignation and endurance. This is at the very heart of our grief and sorrow. The dream of full-throated living, woven into our very being, has often been forgotten and neglected, replaced by a societal fiction of productivity and material gain. No wonder we seek distractions. Every sorrow we carry extends from the absence of what we require to stay engaged in this “one wild and precious life.” And every sorrow is made more difficult to metabolize by that absence. Grief work offers us a trail leading back to the vitality that is our birthright. When we fully honor our many losses, our lives become more fully able to embody the wild joy that aches to leap from our hearts into the shimmering world.
Lastly, this book is a prayer, a plea on behalf of our beloved earth. I write to speak to the deepening sense of loss we are feeling as the life systems of our planet show continuing signs of strain and decline. This pain is intense and almost unendurable. I write for the sake of our communities and for the salmon, ospreys, monarch butterflies, grizzlies, and for the generations to come. This book, then, is an act of remembrance through which our eternal connection to animals and plants, rivers and hills, trees and clouds can be reawakened. It is a gesture of protest, calling us back to a life of connection and intimacy, of feeling and wonder. It is an invitation to feed the fires of our aliveness and coax us back to life. All this comes to us through the providence of grief.
Grief is always, in some way, accompanying us. There are times when the presence of sorrow is acute: a partner dies, a home turns to ash in a fire, a marriage dissolves and we find ourselves alone. These seasons in our lives are intense and require a prolonged time to honor what the soul needs, to fully digest the grief. Sorrow is a sustained note in the song of being alive. To be human is to know loss in its many forms. This should not be seen as a depressing truth. Acknowledging this reality enables us to find our way into the grace that lies hidden in sorrow. We are most alive at the threshold between loss and revelation; every loss ultimately opens the way for a new encounter.
In turn, by restoring grief to soul work, we are freed from our one-dimensional obsession with emotional progress. This “psychological moralism” places enormous pressure on us to always be improving, feeling good, and rising above our problems. Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling that we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard. This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld, where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coated in a mantle of shame. People in my practice routinely apologize for their tears or for feeling sad.
I am an advocate for a soul psychology that senses vitality in every emotion, whatever life offers to us in the moment. We will have times of being happy, which is cause for celebration. We will, however, also have times of sorrow and loneliness. Moods will come upon us and events will occur that evoke anger and outrage in us. In fact, archetypal psychologist James Hillman once noted that being outraged is a sure sign that our soul is awake. Each of these emotions and experiences has vitality in it, and that is our work: to be alive and to be a good host to whoever arrives at the door of our house. Happiness, then, becomes a reflection of our ability to hold complexity and contradiction, to stay fluid and accept whatever arises, even sorrow.
I also wrote this book to address the two primary sins of Western civilization: amnesia and anesthesia—we forget and we go numb. These two sins account for an amazing range of sorrows. When we are lost in what author Daniel Quinn calls The Great Forgetting, we slip into a mode of being that neglects the wider bonds of our belonging. We forget that we are all tangled together in this nest of life, that the air we breathe is shared, as is our water and soil, and that everything is bound together in a seamless web of life. When we forget, we are able to do untold damage to our watersheds, to one another, and to the entire earth.
Modern technological society has forgotten what it feels like to be embedded in a living culture, one rich with stories and traditions, rituals and patterns of instruction that help us become true human beings. We live in a society with little regard for matters of soul. As a consequence, we need books and workshops on grief, on relationships and sexuality, on play and creativity. These are symptoms of a great loss. We have forgotten the commons of the soul—the primary satisfactions that sustained and nourished the community and the individual for tens of thousands of years. We have substituted a strange, frenzied obsession with “earning a living”—one of the most obscene phrases in our world—for the vital and fragrant life of the soul. We have sadly turned the ritual of life into the routine of existence. This forgetting has reduced the arc of our experience down to its tiniest hub. The wider reach of our beings has faded, and the subtle and nuanced gravity of contact with the world has been diminished. This is heartbreaking!
Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “What we cannot speak about, we pass over in silence.”We have forgotten the primary language of grief. As a consequence, the terrain of sorrow has become unfamiliar and estranged, leaving us confused, frightened, and lost when grief comes near. The haunting silence that Wittgenstein speaks of lingers as a fog over our lives, placing large areas of experience outside of our reach. When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.
Our strategies of anesthesia are equally astonishing. Entire industries have emerged to keep the senses dulled and distracted. Our need to be anesthetized is rooted in our smoldering dissatisfaction with the meager existence we have been offered by this society, itself a profound source of grief. We suffer from what the poet William Blake called “divine discontent.” Our soul knows we are designed for a bigger, more sensuous, and more imaginative life. But we can go for days, weeks, months, a lifetime with only marginal encounters with beauty and the wild, only rarely sharing an intimate moment with a friend. We collude in the numbing as well, slipping into the void through alcohol, drugs, shopping, television, and work, anything to help us ward off the feelings of emptiness that come crashing at our door.
We were not meant to live shallow lives, pocked by meaningless routines and the secondary satisfactions of happy hour. We are the inheritors of an amazing lineage, rippling with memories of life lived intimately with bison and gazelle, raven and the night sky. We are designed to encounter this life with amazement and wonder, not resignation and endurance. This is at the very heart of our grief and sorrow. The dream of full-throated living, woven into our very being, has often been forgotten and neglected, replaced by a societal fiction of productivity and material gain. No wonder we seek distractions. Every sorrow we carry extends from the absence of what we require to stay engaged in this “one wild and precious life.” And every sorrow is made more difficult to metabolize by that absence. Grief work offers us a trail leading back to the vitality that is our birthright. When we fully honor our many losses, our lives become more fully able to embody the wild joy that aches to leap from our hearts into the shimmering world.
Lastly, this book is a prayer, a plea on behalf of our beloved earth. I write to speak to the deepening sense of loss we are feeling as the life systems of our planet show continuing signs of strain and decline. This pain is intense and almost unendurable. I write for the sake of our communities and for the salmon, ospreys, monarch butterflies, grizzlies, and for the generations to come. This book, then, is an act of remembrance through which our eternal connection to animals and plants, rivers and hills, trees and clouds can be reawakened. It is a gesture of protest, calling us back to a life of connection and intimacy, of feeling and wonder. It is an invitation to feed the fires of our aliveness and coax us back to life. All this comes to us through the providence of grief.
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