Grief like a fist in my chest. Three important souls dead in the past six months. How do I move through this complex grief? How does anyone -- especially with a childhood where emotional repression meant survival -- move through such grief?
I woke up one day this week, and a message came as if someone had spoken: “Don’t underestimate the immense beauty of your grief.”
Beauty of my grief. I thought about it all morning.
Within hours, the exact same idea for a grief ritual arrived from two different sources, a post online and a book I was reading. The serendipity was uncanny.
I’d always loved rituals. Rituals and rites always shifted me faster than any other kind of healing.
What was this divinely inspired idea?
Wrapping grief, coddling it, tying it in beauty. Turning it into an offering.
"I belong to no religion. My religion is love. Every heart is my temple." - Rumi
We’re all starving for ritual. Modern life is a study in the absence of ritual. As Malidoma Somé (Dagara elder and author of the book Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community) writes, ritual is the language the human soul speaks with the spirit world.
Without it, grief and transition have nowhere to go.
Somé also writes about how Western culture has forgotten how to grieve, leaving streets full of the ungrieved dead.
Only by allowing full expression of grief, outrage, longing, and pain can people access the wise heart capable of containing them.
For a few days, I sat with the idea of wrapping grief. I knew the ritual would help begin to resolve my grief, but I still couldn’t seem to bear the pain of actually doing it. Because of the complex trauma of my childhood, I’ve learned a way of giving ideas over to Spirit, of letting ideas go if they feel overwhelming and allowing them to ripen in the spiritual world.
So, I let it go and let universe.
This morning, it flowed. The ritual became a vision. Vision became reality.
Outside my yurt studio, I picked sprigs of lavender, rosemary, sage, fir needles.
I took paper I’d hand-made from the pulp of the writing of my women clients. Paper that had been dyed with turmeric, a spice known in India as the Golden Goddess.
Of the three deaths, I decided to begin with friend and mentor, Seattle urban mystic Judith Laxer, who passed away a few months ago.
I wrote a love letter on the Goddess paper:
About women finding divine voice.
About the Golden Goddess.
About wrapping Judith in my heart.
About promises to carry the Divine Feminine forward.
I added her picture, a mystic equine to carry her own her journey, the pungent sprigs from Mother Earth.
After wrapping it with twine, I remembered I should activate my altar.
As I went to tend to it, Judith showed up. She was excited. In her classic style, she took charge.
No, not the votives, the large pillar candle, please. I had sage bundles drying upside down on the other side of the yurt, Go get those and light them!
Nag champa, singing bowl, drum, calling in of the elements, she was the conductor of an orchestra and I was her instrument.
Afterwards, the operatic voice of Maria Callas singing Ave Maria on the iPhone.
I went back to the bundle, and it was glowing. As I placed it in the singing bowl, it vibrated.
I felt profound comfort.
Something moved after that. I went back to work on my Mystic Equine art show, and I felt an energy that was bigger than me.
Whatever was happening it had to do with myth. It grew into legend. It was bigger than the sum of its parts. Bigger than me. Bigger than her. Bigger than all of us.
As I write this, it’s still moving.
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