Honoring Grief Together

Last weekend, I dropped my oldest son off at his dorm so that he could start college. I am excited for him to start this next phase of his life, to have new experiences and challenges, and to keep blossoming into his full self. I am also feeling the loss of his physical presence in our home, and the transition feels extra intense, layered over the backdrop of the climate crisis, the deaths in Palestine, and the unconscionable violence happening across the world. It seems that this is all perfect timing, since Autumn is the season of grief.

This polycrisis of the world, as Sophy Banks calls it, seems to be amplifying the sense of vulnerability and uncertainty I’m feeling. I want to relax into the calm of life and metabolize the grief from this most recent loss. Yet, when I relax in and try to be with my feelings, a door opens into deeper and deeper layers of grief for what is happening in the world. It’s as if I am expecting to open a metaphorical door to step onto a porch where I can watch the waves and sunset for a couple of hours, but when I pull the door back, a tidal wave threatens to knock me down and wash away my entire house.

For my own survival, I have to shut the door.

On my drive home from the dorms, I listened to an interview with Camille Sapara Barton on Green Dreamer. Camille was speaking about her new book, Tending Grief. She speaks to the isolation that many of us feel, especially at moments of transition. In our society, there is often no space for communal grieving, and we are left to process feelings alone, leading to overwhelm.

This tsunami of grief was never mine to chew on alone. While some of the water that makes it up has been due to individual traumas, the bulk of this wave comes from events that should have elicited ceremony in my community and even further out into the world. It feels like this wave in me reaches back to an ocean where we are all connected in our collective bereavement. I start to think about ideas of the Dao 道—in that I have my own, unique and individual Dao 道, or path, and mine connects to that of my family, which connects back to my ancestors, running further back into the Dao 道 of all human beings. This continues back to the Dao 道 of the animals and to all life on Earth, and then to the Earth itself. It continues further, back to the planets making up our galaxy and on and on to the Big Bang and perhaps even farther than that. At the end of these branches, we eventually reach the original source for everything.

We are absolutely connected to each other, and we must honor this ocean of collective grief together. This is the only way that something so large will ever become manageable for us. Until we are able to do this, each of the smaller experiences we are having continues to add to the weight until it breaks us, one by one.

Camille Barton talked about her work in decolonizing grief and trying to break away from colonial frameworks that pathologize or repress sorrow. She advocated for ancestral and community-based approaches that honor the ongoing, cyclical nature of grief, reminding us that tending to grief is both a spiritual and political act. This is reminiscent of Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry work, in which she says, “Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy.”

As I watch many of the human leaders of the world focusing on violent conflict, I wonder what I can do as an individual to help with this. How can we change the culture? The Tibetan yogini Machig Labdrön, who founded the practice of chöd, taught that we must face our inner demons—the fears, desires, and emotions that drive us—if we are to transform our relationship with the world. She said, 'To cut through ego-clinging, offer your heart, and feed your demons with love and compassion.' This reminds me that, while I cannot control the external world, I can confront my own inner conflicts and create harmony within myself.

But this work is not meant to be done in isolation. In the same way that Buddhist monks were supported by their monasteries and communities, we too need a collective foundation to do this challenging emotional and spiritual work. The colonial myth of individualism ignores the support systems that allow deep transformation to happen. Doing this work alone can be overwhelming, especially in the face of such monumental global grief.

For over a decade, I have hosted and participated in Circle gatherings, mostly of women. This has been some of the most healing work I’ve found for myself, where there is no ‘expert’ giving advice, but rather a web of community where everyone weaves between the roles of receiving and giving. In these circles, we share our living stories with each other, letting them breathe and morph as necessary. We navigate the waves of life together, seeing further back into the mystery of how those waves came to be and what shores they might crash upon.

Through guided meditations, the creation of altars and sacred spaces, making art, being silly and profane together, burning written words, or even sitting in silence for hours, these circles have provided a powerful space for healing.

When I return from Nepal, I’d like to host a Sunday Seasonal Seed Circle that will meet each season throughout 2025 for people who are interested in becoming facilitators of Circles in their own communities—because this work, like the waves of grief we face, cannot be done alone.