Sudden Loss

“It never gets easier,” I said to a young man in grief. Losing people is always hard. It’s okay to hurt. It’s okay to be mad. It’s not supposed to be pleasant.

My friend Thatch put it best, sitting across from me at the picnic table, bringing comfort to a dark moment. He said there’s a box in your brain, where you compartmentalize your friends, where all the bits and pieces of who they are to you live. Death upends the contents of that box and scatters them. The scattering is grief. It brings old things to the surface.

Time is not relevant. You have to relive every memory all over again, with new eyes. And your new eyes perceive those memories with the knowledge that the living, laughing friend in your recollections is now dead. It’s hardly the amount of time we spend with someone that prompts our grief, it’s the depth in the time spent together that does.

No, it never gets easier, but with each loss we have to navigate, with each grieving we endure and push past, we get stronger. We learn tools to transform the grief. We hold onto the knowledge that someday, though we will always miss them, we will be happy for their peace. Even if that day is not today.

We were on the mountain at a festival last week when news reached us of the sudden passing of our friend Freya Moon Greenleaf. I was grateful to hear the bad news in the midst of a spiritual container, surrounded by friends and fellow community members. Miles away from our home community, those of us who had travelled to the festival came together in our sorrow.

We gathered in the Ancestor Shrine, in the woods by the water, and called in our ancestors to welcome Freya to Spirit. We hung a prayer ribbon for her and wished her peace. We wished that her next turn around the earth will be happier and better for her. That part was for her, to honor her. But the grief is still real. Today, it is still fresh and still here.

“Love,” Sarahluna whispered to me, “just love.” And she was right. When you’re grieving the only place that’s safe to go is love. The best way we can honor those lost to us is to live in the world as brightly as we can. To laugh, touch, connect. To live, breathe and love.

That’s the part of grief that’s about us. We hurt because we know we won’t see our friends and loved ones anymore. We are hurting. They are not. Every breath we take reminds us of that. It also reminds us that we are alive. So we tell the people we love that we love them and hold tightly to them because in death we know how quickly a light can go out. So we breathe into those lights, to strengthen their flame.

I am lighting candles for your safe travels, Freya.

May the ancestors welcome you home.

May the memory of your laughter outshine the loss of you soon.

What I Thought I Knew

Every autumn, I travel to the Berkshire Mountains to attend Twilight Covening, an event created by the EarthSpirit Community. It’s a time to do deep magic of connection with other people, with the lands we live on, with the changing of seasons, and it’s a time where I find a deeper connection to myself. I use the sacred space and rituals to prepare for winter work, for there is always work to be done. Every time I find myself reaching a place I worked towards, I see that the path stretches out further still ahead of me. There is no end to the current. I am the current. There is more to do, more to learn.

This year the work I was doing was around learning tools to replenish yourself when you are depleted. I often ask the question, who cares for the caretakers? We all have someone in our lives we count on to have the answers and to solve the problems (even if it’s ourselves). We can’t care for others if we are not cared for. It doesn’t stop us from trying. Most of us often deflect from our own needs, wants and workings, thinking we are better people for sacrificing them in the wake of the needs of others. What happens when we have exhausted ourselves in caretaking? Who, in turn, cares for us? This weekend, I was given an answer, one that was so simple it should have been obvious.

We worked in the sun of the mountain top to connect to the spirit of tree, water and stone. The spirit of breath, fluid and bone. I thought it would be easy. I thought I understood what that meant. I have spent my life hugging trees, grounding in water and loving the stones of the earth. I forgot the layers of consciousness that are difficult to perceive from this side of the world.

We are one species of the earth’s children and many of us cannot hear its voice anymore. We have to learn to quiet and listen. It wants to teach us what it knows. And when we are depleted of energy down to our core essence and we have exhausted all of our resources in the care of others, we must turn to the natural world, our mother, and *trust* that she will help us, giving us what we need, moving through the world for us while we rest in ourselves and receive those gifts. It’s not the same thing as shutting down emotionally to do what needs to be done. It’s staying connected, and staying present, but being supported.

When we were connecting to stone, we were told to “push beyond the depths of our own silence,” to find stillness. Only I was rocking. I have nerve-damage in my left leg from an accident that is obvious to no one but me. Sitting on the floor for long periods of time causes nerve firings down the length of my leg. In that moment in the pine forest, when I realized I was rocking, I understood it to be something I do to distract myself from the pain, to move that excess energy through my body in a current and grounding it outward so it does not burn.

When I was sitting in my rock, a giant nugget of mountaintop with rough veins of quartz running through it, I didn’t know where to start. I took some deep breaths to my version of stillness and I opened myself to the stone beneath me. I whispered to the earth that I did not know how to find its stillness. I took myself to the edge and told the stone that I could not speak its language through the barrier that was my pain. I asked the mountain, the deep ancestor, the bones of our planet, to teach me to find stillness.

I felt so cold, sinking in until the edges between us blurred. I moved to the very skin of the pain of this body and then I took a deep breath. The stone beneath the pain was waiting for me. In one flash, pushing through the barrier, I experienced the fullness of the pain in a blinding white light like being electrocuted. And then… there was no pain. None. For the first time in ten years, I was sitting in exquisite stillness and silence, aware of the sounds of the world around me, but inside we were at peace, the stone and me. I wept openly for a long time, as our clan time commenced. “Once you know something, you can’t unknow,” my Clan leader said.

That peace lives inside me, and that place without pain does, too. It requires work on our part to find it. It requires that we take the time to build a relationship with those spirits. So to find it again I will build relationship with stone and learn its version of stillness. Anyone who has ever navigated a human relationship… it’s that big. It’s that serious. It requires that level of commitment. And once you open that door, the world opens to you. You just have to get out of your own way and listen.

This walk, this path, this work is opening before me and I accept it though it is frightening. I am opening myself up to something infinitely larger than I can comprehend. I am opening my consciousness up to something that will constantly keep me humbled and in service. But what am I if not a child of this world around me, part of its genetic make-up? What am I if not a daughter of the Earth? What am I if not breath, fluid and bone, if not also tree, water and stone?

Connect to the EarthSpirit Community.

Open (What the Mountain Told Me)

Take a breath and feel me beneath you. Feel the rough and smooth skin of me holding and supporting you as we reach up to the skies, like trees, roots in the earth and arms reaching eternally toward the wonder… reaching up and outward when the heart of you lies within and below. Take a breath and follow me. I will show you how.

Open to the starlight, to the history of our ancestry shining above us. Open to the glittering mirrors reflecting the great unknown mystery we carry within, beneath the surface. We are all children of stardust, descending over eons, travelers through space who fall as light falls against absence into ether, into body. Light falls and life falls into brilliant darkness. A jewel in the sky, the star reminds us that even heavenly beings die, shift and transform.

Open to transformation, to the echoing footfall of the two-legged and four-legged Spirits walking among us. The beings who made way, like river opening to delta, for our bodies to take in breath and be here. We are one, but not without the millions who came before. The stars above us knew our ancestors. The earth beneath us knows our names.

Open to the Ancestral Spirits of the trees that flourished into forest and fell in the woods, whose bodies nourished the ground, built our homes, and feed our fires. Our ancestors lived in the bones of their ancestors. They were and are felled for our survival and the time has come. Return to the trees. Return to their stewardship and honor their dead.

Open to the voices of the living trees around you and remember that they are a-live beings, too. Open to the power within you to wake change beneath your feet.

Awaken yourself to the well of mysteries that lives within you- that glimmer of dust that glows at twilight. Follow the blood to the Source and re-member that the way to the Ancestors lives within you. You are the way-point of all the mothers and fathers who have come before you. You are the doorway. The ancestral fire burns behind the eyes of every person you meet. It fuels your path.

Wake up and remember.