Grief is Elemental: Paradoxical & Essential

In the shadow of the great Tetons, I have learned something...

It has been almost six weeks since saying goodbye to Coda. Six weeks ago I would have told you I knew Grief – the textures, smells and even mercurial contours of it – that there was not much more I could learn about this essential elemental being in the pantheon of our belonging. 

Was I ever wrong.

And of course I was. How could I have imagined I ‘knew Grief’? That would be like saying I know my two sons or I know my dearest friends, or the lakes and rivers in the Adirondacks that are my soul’s home. So I stand gratefully humbled. This morning as I sit down to write to you and I see the image, one of my favorites, of our wild jubilant elkhound coyote (a black and white image of him sitting in the snow and staring up

Coda listening to Snow

and over his right shoulder as the flakes fall gently on his face, eyes closed…all wonder and delight, all love for this elemental with whom he was enraptured every time it fell from the sky, into whom he would burrow like a badger into the fertile soil searching for sustenance and surprise, as if he was made most whole only when he had two nostrils packed full of Snow) I burst into tears. I suppose it will just happen like that, maybe forever. I hope it never stops happening, his impact on me was just that essential.

And this is the kind of Grief I’m familiar with. Grief from the purest place of missing, of sadness, or love that now has no physical place to act itself out with the subject of its devotion. Broken-hearted love. I’ve been wrapped in her filament wings and caught in her talons since I can remember remembering. As the story goes I was the most joyful child. But at some point, around ten, I began weeping and wailing with the same fluidity with which I laughed and erupted into giggles. I remember my parents being so confused. What’s wrong with her? they would wonder, as if there weren’t perfectly reasonable reasons to erupt into wailing every day as there are to fall into whimsical laughter and delight. As if a sane person wouldn’t spend just as much time grieving as she does celebrating and savoring. I was just doing what I seemed to be very good at doing – letting The World have its way with me. So Grief is no stranger to me. 

This past week I was made aware of another facet of Grief as I drove up to and then lived in the glorious Teton Mountains of northwest Wyoming for another download of wisdom, nourishment and pure sanity from some people I trust most with my soul. The offering, ‘Coming Home to An Animate World, A Way of Ceremony and Conversation’, was dreamed up by Geneen Haugen and co-lead by Bill Plotkin with graceful and wise assistance from Christie Diamond and Emma Duke. I have been in so many containers, endless trainings, programs and circles of all kinds, and these (the containers woven by the guides of Animas Valley Institute) are the only ones I trust at this point in the strange and brittle-edged devolution of our capacity to be in true community with each other. But that’s not the focus of this essay. If it were, I would have to change course to write an essay about pure praise and gratitude. The focus of this essay, what has me by the heart this morning, and has since I descended North/West off the Continental Divide plummeting, falling – and falling in love as I sped down into what is called Jackson Hole – is a new understanding of this life partner of mine, Grief.

Let me say at the outset here that I will not do this justice. But I’ll surely try. 

The Grand Tetons by Mark Ingraham

There are some lands, some Earthly terrains, that evoke awe. That inspire in us the deepest imaginal threads to kindle themselves into action and weave within us a more ferocious and devoted experience of our belonging to The World. Perhaps they contact the sleeping, forgetting parts wakening them back into life. As I drove down into the valley that is actually a deep crater (some 7-10 miles down) made from the insistence of Life to increasingly implicate itself with itself in a constant dance of possibility (how I would define ‘Eros’), I experienced a new kind of Grief as I was overcome with the awe of this place. The level of Life’s insistence is palpable in this particular place. In some cases, depending on where the eyes might fall, it is even violently insistent. Crashing tectonic plates, coming together over millions of years (but for the Earth and its infinite Cosmos that’s more like a couple of hours). Here in this place I got a clear sense of the constant iterative unfurling that is Earth; of one minute (which we call millions of years) of ocean, then the next moment (millions of years of) thunder and lightening, then the next ice, then dinosaurs and mammals, then fire, then ice, then forests and deserts then this moment. Millions and billions of years of exquisite transformation, almost as if the ability to transform was the motivation, was the point of it all. Lying in my tent on the second night I had a revelatory moment, half asleep and half awake, as I imagined the heartbreak of these moments of transformation. Heartbreak made possible, made inevitable, simply because everything is going so beautifully well that it cannot help but change. Wellness brings change just as much as crisis. New possibility is forged out of devotion as much as demand. And perhaps the more well it is – the more a moment is animated with the pulse of nutrient-dense, erotically intelligent life – the more it will feel the imperative to shift into the next unimaginable expression. Like the moment a sea-dwelling creature – in a world of only sea-dwelling creatures, in a world that is only just barely knowing land and creating land – dreams of being a land-dwelling creature. Dreams of lungs that will require oxygen. Dreams of legs where before there were only fins. 

I felt bereft for a moment, imagining how much the Earth and certainly for that matter the Cosmos, has grieved for the process of everything going so well, so generatively. Just as it is saying hello to prokaryotic microbes, marveling in its dreaming capacity to bring about never-before-seen expressions, just long enough to fall hopelessly in love, on with the next iteration it goes. No long-term relationships here, except with Life itself. 

It’s commonly understood that we grieve as a result of losing someone we love. But if that’s true, love and grief are inextricably intertwined. Perhaps as if they must go together. One made more whole by the other. So often we grieve because we have lost someone in an event that we see as a tragedy (of sorts). What I came to know in the southern shadow of the magnificent Tetons with all the fertile life made possible by the ever-changing magnitude and vibrancy of this ecosystem, is the fluency of the grief we feel when everything unfurls beyond our wildest imagination and that means that everything we love, that is so beautiful, so breathtaking, will be – must be – no more, to make room for the next unimaginable, beautiful and breathtaking moment of possibility. In this way, it’s true that nothing lasts but nothing is lost. A record of all the previous brilliance without which none of this could ever be, burned into the hearts  of those who bear witness, in the form of Grief. Which is also celebration. Which is praise. Which is fuel for the next unfolding. Imagine the faith and trust (perhaps wholly unconscious, but we will never know) of that sea-dwelling creature whose pioneering eros made everything I know and love possible. Imagine the surrender to Life’s promise of unfurling that is required to say yes…yes…I will go where you invite me…I will imagine myself into legs and lungs and dry air only ever to be an awkward visitor now in the place that was once all I ever knew…A tear falling from the left eye where the right eye has its site set on the horizon of new possibilities. 

As I approach 60 I am apprenticing to this. I am apprenticing to the trust and faith that has made me and this world possible. And I will continue to learn to quiet myself to hear the thread of the dreaming that is mine to hear, that turned oceans into million-year lightening storms into ice ages into deserts into the miracle of prokaryotic microbes then gymnosperm then angiosperm then dragon fly and grizzly bear, beaver and glacier, migrating bison and the snoring of wolves as they lie on each other under a noisy night sky.