what if we joined our wilderness together?

This is a postcard from the Redwoods of Scotts Valley, California. I am on the LOVE MAMA GRIEF RETREAT with Dr. Laura Berman. (Many may know her from her magical and transformational work on The Oprah Show!) She has crafted a beautiful and intentional reimagining of the kind of support she had when she lost her beloved son Sammy.

Three years in the making, she has brought 66 mothers here — returning to where she found her own profound healing. This is the most extraordinary and transformational offering — filled with the many modalities and practitioners that helped her, when she arrived at 1440.

I shared an hour of prompted writing yesterday as part of the retreat program. If you have been in my Circle, or even here in the Stacks, you know I believe this to be one of the most important of grief tending tools! Sometimes we don’t know the words that are waiting to be seen and written until they reveal themselves to us on the page. So many of the women have shared they are now writing. (Be still my heart!) We are deeply immersed in the beauty of nature and space created for intentional healing. It is a gift and a privilege, that is not lost on me. It is my new wish for everyone who has lost a loved one, to be here in the energy of the Mother of all Mothers.

I shared a prompt yesterday, inspired by The Book of Delights, by Ross Gay. He wrote an essay a day, for 100 days, on delight. Making a list of delights, seems like a lighter lift than gratitude to me. I know all the science around gratitude and still….if joy and gratitude had a sibling — is may just be delight. Delight is a glimmer. A spark. A sparkle. It is easy to find on even the griefiest of days. The more we seek delight the more we see it expand and illuminate around us.

In this snippet of his work from the book, he talks about being joined in the wilderness together. I see how this is not only true - but essential to healing. To be seen and heard and witnessed in grief, is to know that our grief matters and our loved ones more. To be joined in our wilderness is to know we are never alone.

“Among the most beautiful things I've ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: "What if we joined our wildernesses together?" Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexpected territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.
And what if the wilderness - perhaps the densest wild in there - thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) - is our sorrow? Or... the 'intolerable.' It astonishes me sometimes - no, often - how every person I get to know - everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything - lives with some profound personal sorrow... Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?
Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is - and if we join them - your wild to mine - what's that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrow, I'm saying.
I'm saying: What if that is joy?”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

Please share your delight in the comments.

x, B