GRIEF RITUAL LINEAGE

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To read about the Eastern European Professional Mourners, click here. 

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I attended my first grief ritual in the PNW in 2018 with Nala Walla and Laurence Cole. The ritual was influenced by the lineage of the Dagara People from Burkina Faso, brought to Turtle Island by Sobonfu & Malidoma Somé in the 80's & 90’s. The ritual I attended at the time was additionally informed by the work of Joanna Macy, Frances Weller, Angeles Arrien, Martin Prechtel and other animist ways of knowing and remembering from Jewish and pagan practices. 

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The grief circles we hold today continue to be informed by the work Sobonfu + Malidoma brought to the west and I would not be doing this work without being impacted by the ripple of Sobonfu’s (in particular) work. And the grief circles we hold today do not pretend to be the rituals brought by the Somé's. 

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I acknowledge the ways in which being influenced by Sobonfu's work and not carrying the ritual in the way she brought it can be a form of appropriation. I acknowledge that receiving financial reciprocity in exchange for facilitating this work can be complex based on my positionality as a woman of European descent influenced by a gift brought by people of African descent on stolen land with a history (and current reality) of exploitation and murder of Black bodies. I grapple with these complexities on a daily basis. I also acknowledge the nuance that the Dagara Elders sent Sobonfu and Malidoma to the west as a survival strategy for their people and the wellbeing of the planet. They had been and are experiencing the abuses + pillage of colonialism in their villages and intuited that those causing this harm both on individual and systemic levels were being caused as a result of stagnated/frozen grief: a forgetting of how to grieve. Sending Sobonfu and Malidoma to the west to help westerners remember how to grieve (communally) was an approach to mitigating the sickness of colonialism spreading even further and wider across the planet. I am slowly building relationship with some of Malidoma's brothers in Dano with longings to form direct lines of reciprocity back to the origin. 

 

As I hold the both-and, the contradictions of choosing to be in this work, I also acknowledge the amount of frozen grief alive in the collective field that longs to be melted into movement and aliveness and witnessed by community. It is to this work that I am in service. 

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The grief retreats we offer are a combination of something ancient and something being birthed by the times we are living in, and of Lands we are a part of. 

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What I mean by something ancient is what comes through my connection and work with my ancestral lineages. The ancient peoples of Europe too, had grief practices, long before we called it that. In my own bloodlines, in the Jewish tradition, the Mikonenet (one who laments) embodies the pain and truth of change (aka known in Eastern Yiddish as klogerins, klogerkes (wailing women), klogmuters (wailing mothers), baklogerins, beterins (implorers), baveynerins (weeping women) and zogerins/ zogerkes). My Scandinavian ancestors practiced "sitting in the ashes," where our duty is to mourn, travel the underworld and rise back as tenders to the village during great times of adversity. The art of keening is practiced by my Irish ancestors and the coronach by my Scottish lineage. There are long histories of lamenting wombxn & non-binary folks in many ancient European cultures (with very few still existing) who were professional mourners, improv poets & song bearers that attended funerals, cemeteries and other collective ritual spaces to channel the grief on behalf of the individual or community and to catalyze wailing. 

 

What I mean by being birthed by the times we are living in and of Lands we are a part of are: what have we created in this era that we belong to? What are we already creating? What do we have access to right now? This could mean song, listening, trash, Water & salt, Earth, Fire and smoke blowing with Wind. How does the community become the healer together? Where can we grieve together and normalize the depth of ache that is living in the collective field? What does it mean to grieve in public spaces? What does it mean for our grief to be a conscious offering to Land? What does it mean for the healing of human and Land to not be separate? 

 

Francis Weller says, “I am not sure if we were made to hold so much grief.” If there is one thing I know for sure, we are living through a time where humans need sanctuary to grieve together, so that there may be more possibility for it to be transformed, morphed into action, shapeshifted into compassion.

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As a cis-woman of European descent born on Turtle Island, I am born of dozens of generations of the uprooted & rootless. For myself and others like me, we were born spiritually emaciated with no intact culture to teach us the cosmologies of our deep time ancestors, to teach us reciprocity with Land, to teach us how young we are as humans amongst vast ecosystems of ancient wisdom holders such as Plants, Animals and Fungi, to teach us how to honor the sacred, the elements, the songs, the dances, the dreams, the community, the rites of passage to mark transitions in life. Where are our elders of European descent to help us remember our roots? We should be washing your feet. The grief I carry, as a result of this absence is profound. We must become the mentors that we are seeking. These grief rituals are an emerging remembering and an act of rebuilding culture where it has been deeply lost, stolen and forgotten amidst the numerous ways in which neo-colonial acts continuously perpetuate the stolen and forgotten.

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As a human and facilitator, I have limited experience on Earth as only living in this one body. Some of my experiences include survivorship, queer, cis-woman of euro descent living with advantages of having white skin, neurodivergence, cptsd, housing security, parent, nomad, traveler, shadow worker, dreamer, relationship with suicidal ideation and depression, low-income, working towards gift economies, equity & life-affirming systems. 

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That being said, these rituals are open to all people, with the understanding of my limitations. I seek to learn, to expand and to honor our humanity and our differences.

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I always co-facilitate these offerings. As those collaborations emerge, you can be informed by signing up for my newsletter.

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I am a student of life and for life and welcome compassionate inquiries about this lineage or grapplings mentioned in this article.