I Want the World to Grieve With Me

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash 

I want the world to grieve with me. I am sure we all want - or at least need - the world to grieve with us. But we are grieving, for the most part, alone. I watched a video last night of Francis Weller, psychotherapist, author, and soul activist, discuss the way in which we grieve. He noted that for all of human history prior to the point we are at now, grief was a shared experience. Now, in our modern societies, we grieve for the most part alone - and, we only tend to recognize one type of grief.

Francis Weller outlines that there are five gates of grief. Briefly:

1) The grief that occurs when we lose something or someone we love

2) The grief that occurs when we lose some part of ourselves that we’ve never known

3) The grief that comes due to the losses of the world, such as destruction of the forests, loss of animal life

4) The grief that is due to what we expected when we came into this world but never received

5) Ancestral grief

Weller also spoke of the anger that comes when our grief is compressed. I can see this anger festering in myself and in the world as a whole. Deep beneath that anger, I know there is immense sorrow. Sorrow for all the things we’ve lost that we struggle to put words to - or, that when we put to words, we find ourselves without an integral, mature community to support us in being with it. We have no rituals for grief, other than for when someone we love passes away. We are left largely to our own devices for the other forms of sorrow.

My grief is not due to the most commonly recognized type of grief. I feel sorrow due to other losses. I grieve for:

• The loss of wild places - healthy, diverse forests, soil, lakes, rivers, and oceans

• The loss of sanity and reason, and equally the loss of intuition or more subtle ways of knowing

• The loss of basic human freedom

• The loss of the sacred as celebrated through ritual

• The loss of true community - community rooted in what matters most

• The loss of play, ease, peace, and wonder

Beneath my anger and frustration are these losses. I know I am not alone, yet for some reason, we are not coming together with our sorrow. We are not recognizing, holding, and making space for all of the ways in which we grieve. I want to make and hold space for this sorrow and am envisioning some form of sharing circle. If you are interested in gathering to share what weighs heavy in your heart and soul, sign up for my newsletter to stay tuned for a virtual community gathering on grief.

Recommended watch: Francis Weller on Grief (2013)