Welcome to this conversation
No Strangers - Episode 4: Opting in to Grief, the Price of Love. When we start to wonder more deeply about the real lives of ourselves and others it isn’t long before we run into pain. Loving means losing. And that hurts. Being present with that hurt - ours and theirs - is grief. Grief translates into deeper connections and builds our determination and ability to fight for ourselves and others.
Episode 4: Opting in to Grief, the Price of Love
Something can be born out of pain when we opt in to the labor of revolutionary love.
Wonder, grief, anger and joy are all part of that labor.
Wonder is a practice we can return to with each new breath. Even when it gets difficult.
Grief, anger and joy are different. Unlike wonder, they are tender, risky, vulnerable parts of being human that we don’t choose as much as allow.
Rumi helps us understand these harder-to-welcome visitors of our inner selves with his poem. The Guest House. Here are the last lines:
"Be grateful for whoever comes
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond."
Can we be grateful even for grief?
Listen to Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper's beautiful conversation about grief. Jump to minute 13 to hear them wrestle with this question together.
Grief does not:
Come as a lesson or a test from God
Dismiss pain or happen on a timeline
Shortcut around the pain of loss.
Seek out or wallow in pain - letting it become stuck in you and you in it.
Being grateful for grief is different from being glad for the loss. Grief is a practice that says people and life matter. There are no strangers. We are together in all the joy and the suffering that comes with this gift of getting to exist.
“Grief is the price of love. Loving someone means that one day, there will be grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them. The more you love, the more you grieve. Loving someone also means grieving with them. It means letting their pain and loss bleed into your own heart. When you see that pain coming, you may want to throw up the guard rails, sound the alarm, raise the flag, but you must keep the borders of your heart porous in order to love well. It is an act of surrender...” -Valarie Kaur
Practice allowing grief to have space in you.
Kali Pliego shared two stories that hold a lot of grief from her work as a community liaison with the Minneapolis Police.
What did you notice as you listened to these stories?
What did you feel and where did you feel it?
What can happen when people grieve together?
Kali told a story of giving people permission to feel and space to grieve together.
Unfelt, unwitnessed emotions are not benign. Ignore them and they don’t go away.
There are harmful ripple effects of pain when it isn’t felt and moved through.
There are also ripple effects when people grieve together, each in our own ways and time.
“Grief does not come in clean stages: It is more like a current of a river, sweeping us into new emotional terrain, twisting and turning unexpectedly. In one moment we need to cry and rage, in another we feel nothing at all, and in another we feel a sense of acceptance, until we find ourselves one day sobbing on the steering wheel of a car as a song plays on the radio. Grief has no end really. There is no fixing it, only bearing it. The journey is often painful, but suppressing grief is what causes the real damage - depression, loneliness, isolation, addiction, and violence. When we are brave enough to sit with our pain, it deepens our ability to sit with the pain of others. It shows us how to love them.” -Valarie Kaur
A practice:
Keep the borders of your comfort zone porous. When you see someone unfamiliar, instead of seeing them as a stranger, say in your mind cousin, sibling, friend I don’t know yet...I wonder what losses you have experienced?
Grief doesn’t need fixing, treating or healing. Grief IS the healing.
Amanda Gorman’s inaugural words give a vision of what is possible when you and I opt in together to revolutionary love, grief and all.
There is always work to be done. Some of it can stop and some of it still needs to happen. But you don’t always have to be the one carrying the pack of the work! This week, take stock