Nov 6, 2024: The power of grief
I wish I could say things will get better, but I think we all know that in many ways things will continue to get worse, and so grief has become a thing that lives with us.
I've noticed the last few years that the more I name my social grief and let myself feel it, the less reactive and squabbly I am, and the more compassion and energy I have to care for others.
Grief requires tending, a form of labor, but the advantage of social/political grief is that we have many hands to make light work — there are millions of us on this planet to help hold it. Even when we feel so alone in the absurdity of loss, we can breathe and remember how many wanted the same world as we do, and we can feel how that world is very much alive in our hearts and collective imagination.
It remains true that what we focus our attention on tends to grow. I know in the coming days I will need to practice redirecting my attention to my own grieving – to outing my relationship with sorrow rather than suppressing it – so that I can spend more energy on being of service, and less energy on being an asshole.
I don't know what works for you when it comes to grieving, but I do know that I will need your love and jokes and shared visions to tend to mine. There is big power in leaning into our common humanity together, and in mirroring each other's deep hopes and dreams for the world.
I think choosing to walk toward one another and to keep seeking connection in the face of cultural atomization is a form of faith, the kind of faith that alchemizes communities and ushers people through the worst horrors.
I've learned that grief is ultimately love turned inside out. The contours of our grief trace the lines of our love for what we lost or what might else have been. And when we share both sides of that coin, when we make our love-pain collective, we find the beating heart of whatever we're building next. I propose we have some faith in that, and that we embrace the idea of faith. Because we have precious little else with which to fight these fucking fascists, and I'm not going down without a fight (for love).
a postscript:
Tending grief is also admitting you have emotions and that you cannot control them, which American men have been raised to avoid. Coincidentally, we are confronting a fascist project in the US that denies male emotional vulnerability or authenticity, and shames men into suppressing primary emotion so that it can be leveraged toward fear and hate. You might argue that speaking about grief is off topic as we consider forms of resistance, I would argue that its very much on topic.
Photo credit: Linoleum block print by Lee Kingman Natti, a juried artwork in the Folly Cove Designers art guild of 1938-1969. Natti and others trained with illustrator Virginia Lee Burton Demetrios, who believed anyone could make art, and taught her neighbors in the Folly Cove corner of Gloucester, MA to closely observe the world around them and perfect their designs for excellence.