The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
Like any true ritual process, we are meant to come out of the experience deeply changed.
Francis Weller • The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
poet and author Robert Bly wryly noted, “How can we get a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, lethargy, or misery? Disneyland means ‘no ashes.’ ”23
Francis Weller • The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
No one escapes suffering in this life. None of us is exempt from loss, pain, illness, and death. How is it that we have so little understanding of these essential experiences?
Francis Weller • The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
Little was expected of them during this time, which often lasted a year or more. The individual’s duty was to mourn, to live in the ashes of their loss, and to regard this time as holy. It was a brooding time, a deeply interior period of digesting and metabolizing the bitter tincture of loss. It was a time out of time, an underworld journey to the
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It is beautiful. There are few things as genuine as a person grieving. There are no questions to ask, no wondering what someone is feeling. It is self-evident. We are revealing the heartache we carry, the sorrows we have shouldered for decades. We are in the tumult of releasing our tears. This is a holy night, and we go on for hours.
Francis Weller • The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
Grief registers the sorrows that befall everything that matters deeply to our souls. Our hearts are kept flexible, fluid, and open to the world through this closeness with loss.
Francis Weller • The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life force. It is riddled with energy, an acknowledgment of the erotic coupling with another soul, whether human, animal, plant, or ecosystem. It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed; it cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and
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We are stripped of excess and revealed as human in our times of grief. Grief ripens us, pulls up from the depths of our souls what is most authentic in our beings. In truth, without some familiarity with sorrow, we do not mature as men and women. It is the broken heart, the part that knows sorrow, that is capable of genuine love.
Francis Weller • The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
The Mayan people say we all carry a deep spiritual debt for what we are given, which we can never fully repay. They say it is important that we do our best to honor this debt with our eloquence and displays of ritual beauty. Our culture has, by and large, failed to honor this debt, and the results are precisely what we see—a world rapidly being
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