Grief and Beauty at the Spring Equinox

About a dozen of us met at the bridge over the Frome at Freshford for the We Are Avon Spring Equinox ceremony. Since this was where I had been sitting with River for the past six or seven years, I was asked to welcome and guide people into the ceremony. I introduced the kissgate as symbolising a threshold into sacred space, and suggested we dedicate the ceremony to ‘all our relations’ for the benefit of all our kin. We walked respectfully across the field to the confluence of the Avon and the Frome, Annie offered a prayer asking for forgiveness for the harm we do, for new understandings of our place in the more-than-human world, and for knowledge as to what River requires of us and need to do to for healing. A wreath of spring flowers was offered to the flow, after which everyone in turn came to the bank to make their prayers and share their offerings. Rivers appeared particularly beautiful and receptive in the spring sunshine, and together we created an atmosphere of respect and love.

After this offering of gifts and prayers to River, we each found a place by River to sit for a while. I saw my familiar place on the bank was not taken, so I sat there. As soon as I was settled with my legs over the bank, looking out over the water, I felt a welling up of grief, a heaving up from my belly. The feeling was deep and familiar, but nameless and without any particular focus. I was not clear if I was grieving the damage inflicted on River, the state of the Gaian ecology, the attack on Iran; or maybe my own aging and the struggle to get up and down from the ground. Or all of these and more.

Did the grief need some expression? Should I cry or howl? I could not tell. And somehow it didn’t matter. What did matter was to allow myself to fully inhabit the feelings and let them course through my body until they subsided somewhat.

Then I looked up, and was straight away enveloped in the beauty of River: the quiet flow of the stream, the greening grass and wildflowers, the swaying branches of Willow, the call of birds, the softness of the air, the arc of the sky above.

And I found I could switch attention, attend again to my grief for a while, and return to the beauty. And gradually the sense of grief subsided, and I simply sat in beauty.

When we shared our experiences in a circle, I remembered Thomas Berry’s teaching about our need for a beautiful planet.

To bear the burden and responsibility of human intelligence, we needed a magnificent world of Beauty in order to give us the healing that we would need. The greatest, deepest tragedy of losing the splendour of the outer World is that we will always have an inner demand for it. We are genetically coded to exist in the world of Beauty.

He goes on to say that our response to such a World is a communion experience:

… ‘how wonderful this is’. Obviously, it’s a World to be venerated. It’s a World to be communed with, to be present, to be delighted in and together, to have a certain experience that might be called ecstatic experience.[i]

I felt as if I had just lived through that teaching.

[i] Words transcribed by PR from Thomas Berry: The Great Story, Bullfrog Films, 2002