I'm deeply sick, heartsick, soul sick, about where we are in history, where we have brought earth, and how easy it is to be stuck in the binary thinking that got us in this anthropocene. We are in high extinction mode, on every level. So many of us are feeling it rocketing in core, cells, bones. It's extreme, it's now. Do you wonder how anyone can continue to show up, work for justice, fight and work, work and fight? They make time to grieve is how. I'm a teacher in ways to be present for grief, and I'm interested in how we can stay present, and in love with life, inside the end of the world. This means I have to allow myself to fall down.
When we grieve, it's a rare opportunity, a softness that's quickly shut down by our colonial/industrial complex and its obsession with "productivity". Yet there's an urgent need to find/create spaces where we can do what the body and soul yearn for in grief. It's extremely honorable to create and hold space for mourning, in all its forms, to be still inside of it. For a long while. Then longer. Longer.
My first album was called "Falling" for a reason, the first song, "Sick" refrain, "I want to fall down, fall down, fall down". I understand it, am not afraid of it. My life has been, since the very beginning, very close to death, over and over and over, marked by great loss and trauma, an uncanny intimacy. This is how the universe called me to my medicine, this is how my ancestors held me in their traditions.
I know grief from all sides, in and out, how to surrender and be filled with its strange magic. I can read it like braille in dark corners of the heart, and have built a life spinning it into art poems songs, movement, sustenance, serenity, communion, service, community. I sink down and come up, everytime with a message. This is an inherited gift, from my ancestors so far back in time they're barely silhouettes under that leafless tree filled with hundreds of yelling crows. Something they want you to know: Where there is movement, there is loss. Where there's loss, there's a need to grieve.
We don't have many spaces for downshifting into mystery, the slowness of rot, swamp, cave. We get restless, crave escape, push out of the fecund into lights, camera, action! Part of this is the spark to live, and healthy. Part of it is that we just haven't been taught the old ways, and are afraid. Balance between realms is possible.
The liminal space grief occupies doesn't fit our binary world. You're either alive or you're dead out here, rise n grind! But that's not earth, it's just our heads. And our heads need grief medicine so bad now, it's becoming pathological.
CLIMATE GRIEF - a fully embodied, ritualized grief - is crucial in this moment in time. And because it directly opposes the machine/culture driving the crisis, to grieve in an open, authentic way is fugitive, wild, radical. I've worked many times to create spaces where we can gather to grieve - it's what AORTA Projects was about, and so much of my work. I want to hold new space for this work now. To slow, to mourn - it won't seem directly proactive, but it is. To feel supported enough to surrender. There is great honor in falling - it won't kill us. In actuality, the opposite is true. And love and earth will rise to catch you
"If you have looked hard at the manner of things, if you have surveyed the troubles of our time, and cannot discover a way forward, do not despair. Do better. Grieve: mount an altar to the sensuous feelings of loss that swim through you. In the stinging fumes that redden the eyes, you might partly recover a clear vision of where to go. You might come to see that forward movement is no longer possible in these moments, and that the way to go was never forward anyway – but awk-ward: into the blackness of catacombs, into the shadows of sanctuary, into the riven cracks signed with the pen of the trickster, into the heat of compost, into the position of a prostrated man who knows that when the storm roars the thing to do is to be still. In that stillness, entire worlds churn," Bayo Akomlafe