Echoes of Grief - a recounting of Ritual and Reclamation

By Patti Kwok, participant Grieving Time 2019

On this Saturday afternoon, she enters a remodeled building in the heart of Sunset Hill, a neighborhood of Seattle Washington. In the partial sunlight, the community center is washed in the afternoon shades of fading paper whites and dandelions, cream cheese and buttered popcorn; portions of the building just passed over by the approaching fall evening and its unfolding blanket of gray chill. November’s canopy alters from ivory fleece to rosy Camelian, mandarin blush becomes turmeric gold and her gilded anchor sinks into a vast sea of star-studded navy and indeterminate black — a beautifully arranged marriage of fire and gravity. 

Entering the upstairs doorway off the newly remodeled deck, she feels a sense of divinity, trusting the light and its tempting pull of embracing angles; it is a house of belonging. The floors are a beautiful oak, creaking sweetly in places like an old wooden bridge, a horse’s weathered saddle, the atrium of a 19th century hotel, or the slant of a well-worn hallway. Within her first breath, the familiar sorrow rushes back like the unsettled salt of ocean, dry prairie, an acre of soil she can never properly tend. She walks the perimeter of chairs containing a reservoir of grief seen in the dark forest pools of another’s eyes, that arrested posture, the smell of secret longings, a place for uncovered grief to finally rest; tremors of hesitation break the sound barrier of forgotten depths where ritual matters. 

Several people kindly acknowledge one another: a man who lost his wife months ago, a recent suicide, a coveted red Swiss army knife from a brother who died long ago, many stories palpable although not quite felt or heard. Artifacts brought from home — photographs, statues, a small metal bicycle, stones carefully chosen from a basket — objects placed on the altar as a life remembered, an earth deeply loved. She fiercely protects her own burden as the ritual has not yet begun. An older man tells her she must download the new app Finding Fred — inviting Fred Rogers back for the wounded adult, the familiar voice of a revolutionary, a spiritual herald and his radical knowing donned underneath a red cable-knit sweater. Invited into beginning ritual, she enters the depth of love beyond fear. 

We know that we have left death and come over into life; we know it because we love others  (1 John 3:14)

Sitting in a circle of sharing, reality comes flooding back — she, too, will lose everything she’s ever loved; but she knows love cannot be kept in the grave. The ritual begins in sacred drumming, depicting the communal heartbeat of longing, that bridge to a forgotten sense of belonging, the primal rhythm of memory and mother, earth and harvests, prosperity and lasting riches. In chorus of evocation, enacted by each of the three facilitators, they bow in all directions. We are guided by ethereal emotional chants and borrowed lyrics from the gods. We enter the untamed world of muse and her many indifferent seasons. The dance of Kairos and her timeless redemption enters the temple, and she engages with the depths of a forgotten freedom. 

Nature’s mandala is constructed from the center out in green willowy fern, a circumference of soft brocade pillows, shooting stars of candlelight illuminate the protected center of grief, surrounded by three other circles — one of nurturing, protecting, and a familiar village on the perimeter where torment is resurrected and levity and mirth take shape in redeeming shadows, where the painted Bacchae take to the hills of wilderness, dancing more freely. Immersed in candlelight and the sacred movement of ritual, she sings the chorus of soul allowing grief to make evident the forgotten joy after loss. From aching heart to open heart, she falls into a devotional trance that reclaims her deeper meaning towards the lost art of being.   

Thirty minutes into the wild frenzy of scattered emotion, falling like leaves and stars, they have broken through oppressive shadows, beyond the sound barrier of Cronos, into a new dawn of time and place. She is pulled towards the altar of radiance, surrendering to a large silky cushion, sacrificing a known way of being — remembering that we are all children of the earth’s dreaming, now pulled into the center of our own belonging, once rootless now tethered — no longer afraid of the invisible, what seemed impossible to know. Wailing and the lonely scream of hunger opens the sentinel gates of psychic numbing — lose and wild weeds tumble into the turbulent matrix of sweat and tears, the lightning strikes, the rains flood, lungs fill with the alchemy of fresh air, ghosts with painted faces masked in red and black wander in the haze of afterlife, building bridges between the visible, the imaginary, the intangibles; ritual leaves nothing in the dark — flames become a galaxy of stars, shorebirds sing towards a rising dawn, the withered sedge returns along jagged shores. Silver tones of fish from the river’s edge are kissed alive by the cycles of sun and moon and the tilting gravity of a re-discovered soul. We must taste the death of our nature. 

Her stony brick of a wounded heart softens into clay, malleable through the curves of time, pulsing with force through the great dams and arteries of grief. Bodies lie in the fertile soil like cocoons hanging from emerald chains of forest, wings form in the shadows of fallen stars, the center circle of sharing becomes a sculpted topiary of broken emotion, tangled threads of red rage unravel secrets left buried far too long. We are like borrowed dust, but something new has been written in the ashes of our lives; like the caterpillar — we were too small to live. New wings carry the intelligence of stars. We leave death and come over into life.   

Encountering Grief

excerpt of a guided meditation from Joan Halifax

Bring attention to the breath, let the breath sweep your mind, notice if deep or shallow

Recall for a moment a loss or losses that have really touched you, or the anticipation of loss

Offer some simple phrases:

~ May I be open to the pain of grief

~ Notice whatever comes up, not rejecting it, not clinging to it

~ May I find the inner resources to really be present for my sorrow

~ May I accept my sadness, knowing I am not my sadness

~ May I and all beings learn from and transform sorrow

~ May I be open to the peace and joy that grief eventually brings

~Joan Halifax

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Creating ‘The Beloved Earth Community’ At Rite of Passage Journeys

By Randy Morris, PhD

An experience that is common to participants at Journeys is the strong sense of solidarity that is created while on a wilderness trip or experiential weekend. What heads out as a group of strangers often returns to base camp with deep friendships that seem more intense than much longer relationships back home. The same phenomenon often occurs in large weekend events that involve ritual and soul work. An energetic field is constellated and participants report tremendous connection and compassion as a result of engaging in deep and sometimes difficult emotional work as a group. The very word ‘compassion’ means a ‘suffering’ (-passio) ‘with’ (com-). This feeling of connection is a hallmark of healthy cultures. The fact that it is so rare is an indication of our broken society, in which online friends can seem closer and ‘more real’ than in-person friends. 

In listening to Journeys participants dialogue with each other about their sacred experiences in nature, both in the moment and in reunions years later, I am struck by the way the normal course of time dissolves. As the story unfolds, the participant’s ‘soul work’, consisting of shared moments of overwhelming feeling and intense insight, seems to be happening again in the moment of telling. This is made possible by ‘deep listening’ in the presence of a true ‘soul friend’, one who ‘listens their way’ into the heart of the other, sees their inner light, and wants to support the radiance that is trying to grow there. 

The mythologist Michael Meade says that an old term for the human soul is ‘the light hidden in darkness’. (1) There is no greater blessing than to have one’s inner light seen and witnessed. In the Jewish tradition of friendship, Meade says, the ‘angel of friendship’ is constellated when the spark of life in one person meets the spark in the other. Their lights are conjoined, which adds more light to the collective light of humanity. In these dark times, the light of creation wants to grow, but it can only do so through the light of the souls who are alive today. The work of Journeys is to provide conditions where these kinds of soul relationships can thrive.  

To what end? Is there an aspirational goal to the work of Rite of Passage Journeys? Perhaps the best articulation of the overall purpose of our work comes from the cosmological vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. King is best known for his work on behalf of social justice. But what is often overlooked is the ecological and cosmological origins of his vision of the Beloved Community. King wrote, “As nations and individuals, we are interdependent. It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. What affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.” (2) 

This is a worldview that was far ahead of its time and it contains just the healing balm we need for our fractured world. As articulated by Drew Dellinger, whose doctoral dissertation was entitled, “The Mountaintop Vision: Martin Luther King’s Cosmology of Connection,” King’s cosmological vision has the capacity to unite the quest for ecological sustainability with the quest for social justice. (3) If social justice is human love made visible, then ecological justice is cosmic love made visible. The Beloved Earth Community is a vision of a world made whole through a cosmology of justice in which interdependence and compassion are woven into the fabric of the cosmos itself. 

The universe, in King’s view, has a moral dimension, and it is “on the side of justice.” (4) In this sense, Justice is a dimension of the cosmic life force itself. In its embrace, everything belongs. Everything co-arises together and is dependent on everything else, whether human or more-than-human. It’s not ‘The Beloved Human Community’ but ‘The Beloved Earth Community. We are all in this together. This is not a simplistic version of everyone just getting along with each other, but an all-inclusive and radical vision in which the inner light of the human soul, the subjectivity of rocks and trees and the bright light of the sun each have their rightful place, their ecos, their home, in a universe that yearns for justice. When all are in ‘right relation’ with each other, the desire of the universe for justice will be fulfilled. In a world made dark by greed, ignorance and violence, this is a startling vision of hope and guidance for the future. (5) By encouraging deep soul work in order to enhance a sustainable earth-human relationship, Rite of Passage Journeys is striving to do its part to foster the Beloved Earth Community.  

Endnotes:

1.  Taken from Michael Meade’s excellent podcast on “Angels of Friendship”, Living Myth Podcast #101, at www.mosaicvoices.org.

2.  From Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” in James Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., (New York: Harper Collins), 1986, p. 254.

3.  Drew Dellinger, “Dr. King’s Interconnected World”, New York Times Op-Ed, Dec. 22, 2017.  For more of Dr. King on cosmological justice, see Drew Dellinger’s website at www.drewdellinger.org.  

4.  This is a common refrain in King’s work.  A concise statement of it can be found in King’s essay on “The Power of Non-Violence” in A Testament of Hope, pp. 13-14.

5.  For more on developing ‘right relationship’ with those with whom you disagree, see King’s sermon, “Loving Your Enemies” in Strength To Love, (Philadelphia:  Fortress Press), 1963.

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Mentoring Youth & Remembering Stan

By Chris Laliberte

Stan Crow founded Rite of Passage Journeys and directed it for almost four decades before he passed in 2009. I started my time here at Journeys in 2018, though was lucky enough to have encountered Stan “in the wild” twice during the formative years I was mentoring youth in the wilderness. At the time, I was working at Wilderness Awareness School in Duvall, Washington, had been intensively mentoring teenagers for five or six years, and was just stepping into the role of teaching adults about mentoring youth. Stan attended the Art of Mentoring at WAS as an honored guest, asked to participate fully and sit in one of the new Elder Chairs that was just beginning to appear at their programs. This workshop happened to be the first one where I stepped onto the stage to join in presentation and facilitation — including sharing poetry, along with some of my own that I’d written in the crucible of my work with youth. Happily, Stan was in the small break-out group I led.

I received several mentor blessings from Stan that week, as we cavorted through the woods, played games in the meadow, spoke in circle, and gathered in the Great Hall at Camp Don Bosco in Carnation, Washington. One I still vividly remember, was watching my small group perform their end-of-the-week skit, and turning bright red as Stan donned a rag mop on his head (my long flowing hair), paged through a phone book (my big binder of poems and songs), and held forth in caricature of me, espousing on lofty topics while muttering too quietly and speaking too fast.

 I also remember sharing one of my poems,“Growing Up,” during culminating ceremonies. The next morning, in discussing the experience, Stan told the group that the point in the ceremony when I shared my poem had struck him: "That is what I'd been looking for, what's been missing here at the Art of Mentoring until now." 

 I remembered this moment again just a few weeks ago, while co-facilitating Journeys’ Crucible of Youth workshop with Darcy Ottey of Youth Passageways. Darcy, who knew and worked with Stan for many years at Journeys, brought much of Stan’s wisdom and insight into working with adolescents (as well as her own experience!). One of the Big Points of the workshop is that you can’t really be an effective, supportive mentor of adolescents unless you have consciously integrated your own adolescent experience. The poem I’d shared at the Art of Mentoring popped into my mind, and I realized that it captured an amazing intersection of the trajectories of Rite of Passage Journeys, Wilderness Awareness School, and my own personal journey of mentoring youth. 

Growing Up

By Chris Laliberte

I remember when I grew up.

I can recall seeing myself seeing myself:

I saw a body

grown into the shape of a man.

But it was a robot, a big machine

being driven by this little child

 a scared, panicked little child

totally unprepared for this.

With no idea of what to do to keep hold of

The One Who Loved Him,

the little child desperately flailed at the controls,

trying anything, anything—

the body lashed out blindly,

struck in all directions with

Word and Tongue and Tear,

flailing madly in a futile effort to keep hold of    

someone who was never there.

It wasn't quite then.

When I grew up, was when

I reached out to that

desperate, crying child

lifting it out of the chest of that

diabolic human chassis

and held it in my own arms

and said "Hey—I love you."

Right then, that little one looked up,

stopped struggling and smiled a little.

Then, as if it was what he'd been waiting for,

the child lay back, closed his eyes,

and died.

What Can I Teach You?

By Chris Laliberte

 What can I teach you

that you'll have any need for?

Facts and information melt sideways

and slide off

under the heat of the flame you carry

without knowing.

What you need me to teach you,

you already know.

It is what will bring you through that fire,

then through the darkness of your grave descent.

What can I teach you of yourself?

How do I ask the questions

that will slip between the bars of your

perception and twist them like grass

to unveil a glimpse?

What can I teach you,

that you might find yourself on hands and knees.

following vole trails to a nest,

or distracted by a meadowlark's song,

look up to see behind the clouds

a new radiance--

shapes without substance,

speaking to you--

voice without words,

in colors you've heard somewhere before:

 In a flower, find the sun

In a pebble, find the moon

How can I,

how can anyone,

teach you this?

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Reclaiming Ritual: A Personal Experience

By Tamara Walker

A few weeks ago, I casually offered to write a piece for Rite of Passage Journey’s new website. As I considered ritual as a possible topic, I heard Trickster whisper, “Write it quick! Don’t think too much and the words will write themselves.” Ritual means a great deal to me, but, after a few aborted attempts, I’m discovering how hard it is to explain why, and that words that matter don’t seem to write themselves.

The first task in my writing seems to be overcoming the heroic in me. Practicing as a veterinary surgeon for many years, I discovered the importance of trying, especially when I was most afraid of failing. In surgery, trying meant I had to push aside doubt and fear and move boldly regardless of how I felt. However, expressing something that I feel in my body requires a different attitude, and if I write from my old heroic place of resigned courage, my words fall out generic and lifeless. I discover I must slow down, listen, and open to the same feelings I buried as a surgeon and so carefully pretended weren’t there. 

The kind of embodied ritual I’m trying to invoke is like difficult writing that says something real and conveys meaning beyond literal words. Good ritual, like good writing, is ruined by a grin-and-bear-it attitude and requires you to show up with everything you’ve got. It could be with a group of friends or strangers, or might simply be alone. Ritual is a delicate candle flickering or a drumming, thrumming explosion of sound. It’s most perfect place is exactly where you are: a beautiful cathedral, an old cracked basement, beside a laughing brook, or in the empty lot across the street. If you can stop long enough and resist the world of running and getting, to notice the texture of small things, you may find your way to that imaginal place where deeper conversation begins.

To try to further explain this kind of ritual, I turn to etymology. The word ritual is associated with religion, from the Latin, relegere, meaning: to pay close attention to what is numinous (Corbett, 2013). Numinous was originally described by Rudolf Otto (1958) in his work, The Idea of the Holy, as a creature-feeling that couldn’t be strictly defined or taught but only evoked (p.7). Numinous also describes the feeling ritual can evoke in my body when I manage to connect to something much greater than myself. Numinous and holy aren’t common descriptions for ritual in our dominant culture, so I also looked ritual up in the APA Dictionary of Psychology. Although I wasn’t surprised,  the definition used hard words like compulsion and rigidity. I felt more like drowning than dancing with the dictionary’s description of a sacred ritual pouring water on the ground to make rain as a misguided, manipulative, and imitative attempt to use symbolism to control natural forces for human ends (p. 802). A ritual may symbolically bridge earth and heaven through a vessel of water, but limiting its meaning to cause and effect this way reveals more about the blindness and confusion around ritual than what it actually might be. How did ritual become the source of such dead definitions? Such derogatory words attempt to put ritual in a box saying, “Here lies the irrational. Do not open.” Sometimes it’s easier to define something by what it’s not, and in loaded words like manipulative and imitative, and by comparing ritual to an obsessive-compulsive disorder, our cultural fear of the unknown becomes hidden in our desire for its containment. 

However, just because something is intangible doesn’t mean we can contain it. In The Art of Inquiry: A Depth Psychological Perspective, depth psychologists Joseph Coppin and Elizabeth Nelson (2005) describe ritual differently as an honoring of what is invisible and intangible. Depth psychology investigates what happens beneath the surface, and is more interested in what we don’t know and what we’re missing than what we believe we can control. To me, in giving these missing things a name, the “invisibles and the intangibles,” we start making them real and a relationship with them possible. When we speak of immaterial things that nevertheless have weight and meaning, other difficult, lost words like fate and soul also appear. Our materialistic culture teaches us the world is dead and to value only what it can do for us when we use it and sell it. We incorrectly think invisible and intangible means only the signal we don’t understand in our TV, Bluetooth, and iPhones. But, an older vision of a living, breathing world of enchanted beings with their own inherent value also exists. This world has been called the anima mundi, the soul of the world. Ritual teaches us again what we once knew: to listen to the whispering of our bodies, the way the wind talks when it gently lifts our hair, or the mysteries and the stories the river can tell. 

Last summer I found an empty stretch of sandy beach and walked a meditative walk in the shape of an infinity symbol. I dreamed a few weeks earlier that I was this symbol, and in response, a friend recommended a meditation she called “Walking the lemniscate.” As the waves lapped on shore and I slowly paced the figure-eight in the deep soft sand, the connections between my body, the wind, the birds, and the earth sang. I felt I was a being that belonged. These are slow things whose greatest gifts are hidden in the experience itself: learning how to write words that matter, or finding one’s way into personally meaningful ritual beyond just going through the motions. For me, ritual is the juice of life, where human beings go to drink the creative energies of the cosmos and be reminded why we’re here, that we aren’t alone,  and what the world might be asking of us.

REFERENCES

American Psychological Association (2007). APA Dictionary of Psychology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association

Coppin, J. & Nelson, E. (2005). The art of inquiry: A depth psychological perspective (2nd ed). Putnam, CT: Spring Publications.

Corbett, L. (2013). Jung's approach to spirituality and religion. In K. Pargament (Ed.), APA handbook of psychology, religion, and spirituality (Vol. 2, pp. 147-167). Washington, D.C.: APA Press.

Jung C.G. (1969). Psychology and religion. (R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Series Eds.), The collected works of C.G. Jung (Vol. 11, pp. 5-105). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published in 1937)

Otto, R. (1958). The idea of the holy. New York: NY: Oxford University Press

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