The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

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In that moment, I understood powerfully the cost to a child who had to be the one to make the overture of repair. If I hadn’t gone in there, my son would have had to ingest his fear that I did not want to be his father any longer. The worst part of it, however, is that he would have felt it was his fault—if he hadn’t been so exuberant, so needy for my attention, I might still hold him in my heart. He would feel he had to restrain these parts of himself in the future if he was to receive my love once again.” My daily practice is to wake and immediately bring my attention to this thought: “I am one day closer to my death. So how will I live this day? How will I greet those I meet? How will I bring soul to each moment? I do not want to waste this day.” Most of us instinctively turn from what makes us uncomfortable. Yet often the greatest gifts lie hidden in what we avoid. Certainly at this time we have much to grieve both as individuals and as a culture; but our collective amnesia about the traditional practices of grieving keep us from uncovering the buried treasures that could be our salvation. In fact, the accumulated weight of our ungrieved losses may be at the root of what is fragmenting our world. Beginning in 1997, Ibegan to offer grief rituals as a way for communities to attend the large and small losses that touch each of our lives. What has become clear is how difficult it is for us to attend to our grief in the absence of community. Carried privately, sorrow lingers in the soul, slowly pulling us below the surface of life and into the terrain of death.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred

In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, author and soul activist Francis Weller, offers a new vision of grief and sorrow. He reveals the hidden vitality in grief, uncovered when the heart welcomes the sorrows of our life and thoseof the world. When the deeper rhythms of grief are allowed to emerge, we becomeaware of the intimate connection we share with all things. We are ripened in times of loss, made more human by the rites of grief. Through story, poetry andinsightful reflections, Francis offers a meditation on the healing power ofgrief." In traditional cultures people were often given at least a year to digest a major loss. In ancient Scandinavia it was common to spend a prolonged period “living in the ashes.” Not much was expected of you while you did the essential work of transforming sorrow into something of value to the community. The Jewish tradition observes a year of mourning filled with observances and rituals to help the grieving stay connected to their sorrow and not let it drift away. Most people today might get a week of bereavement leave, at best, and then everything should be fine. Still, the ground beneath me felt unsteady, as though at any moment it could shake and easily take me to the ground. I stumbled upon what Zen priest and author Susan Murphy calls the koan of the earth. How do we answer the riddle of our times? How do we sift through the shards of our broken culture, our fragmented psyches, and come once again into “our original undividedness and the freedom it bestows, right there in the suffocating fear itself.”90 This was the question at the heart of my despair, ripening in the vessel of my sorrow. What felt different this time was the interior experience of the grief and despair. It was not centered on personal losses—my history, wounds, losses, failures, and disappointments. It was arising from the greater pulse of the earth itself, winding its way through sidewalks and grocery lists, traffic snarls and utility bills. Somewhere in all the demands of modern life, the intimate link between earth and psyche was being reestablished or, more accurately, remembered. The conditioned fantasy of the segregated self was being dismantled, and I was being reunited, through the unexpected grace of fear, despair, and grief, with the body of the earth.” Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-03-19 08:01:29 Boxid IA40077717 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Col_number COL-658 Collection_set printdisabled External-identifierIn addition to his practice, Weller is a staff member at the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, which supports cancer patients who have a life-threatening diagnosis. In 2002 he founded WisdomBridge, which seeks to combine the wisdom of traditional cultures with insights from Western spiritual, poetic, and psychological perspectives. He leads rituals designed to help participants release their grief through writing, singing, and movement. For the last seventeen years he has led the year-long Men of Spirit initiation program through WisdomBridge. Weller has also taught at Sonoma State University, the Sophia Center in Oakland, California, and the Minnesota Men’s Conference. There is often a feeling of shame attached to the survivors of suicide, a hidden doubt that they might not have done enough to prevent this death. This is a doubling of the pain. Their grief is bound together with shame, making it more difficult to talk with others and get the support they need. Finding the courage to share your experience with others is an essential piece in mending this profound sorrow.” Francis Weller's lyrical and moving book offers us a way to remember and embrace these practices and, by so doing, renew our lives and restore the soul of the world. The Wild Edge of Sorrow reads like poetry and isboth a prayer and an invitation: a prayer of soul healing and an invitation tothe mystery of becoming fully human. May it find its way to those who need it(most of us).”- Larry Robinson, poet, former mayor Sebastopol, CA. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller offers his readers a breath-taking and dramatic journey of inner discovery into personal pain resolution, plane-tary healing and Soul development. It is an essential publication - one that offers precious guidance and insight for those who are strong enough, as well as mature enough, to probe and ch allenge the darkness." - Spirituality Today. ​

The Wild Edge of Sorrow) Francis Weller Quotes (Author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow)

Silence is a practice of emptying, of letting go. It is a process of hollowing ourselves out so we can open to what is emerging. Our work is to make ourselves receptive. The organ of receiving is the human heart, and it is here that we feel the deep ache of loss, the bittersweet reminders of all that we loved, the piercing artifacts of betrayal, and the sheer truth of impermanence. Love and loss, as we know so well, forever entwined.” Many of the great myths begin in a time such as this. The land has become barren, the king, corrupted, the ways of peace, lost. It is in these conditions, that a ripeness arises for radical change. It is a call to courage (from the French for full heart) and humility. Every one of us will be affected by the changes wrought by this difficult visitation. It is time to become immense. Herein begins the slow, insidious process of carving up the self to fit into the world of adults. We become convinced that our joy, sadness, needs, sensuality, and so forth are the cause of our unacceptability, and we are more than willing to cleave off portions of our psychic life for the sake of inclusion, even if it is provisional. We become convinced, on some basic level, that these pieces of who we are, are not good enough—that they are, in fact, shameful—and we banish them to the farther shore of our awareness in hopes of never hearing from them again. They become our outcast brothers and sisters” No one enjoys feeling sad. We do everything in our power to evade, avoid, distract, delay, bypass, bargain with, deny, dismiss, and repress sorrow. Yet one man has the courage to ask us to consider signing up for “an apprenticeship with sorrow.” That man is psychotherapist and author, Francis Weller, in his new book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and The Sacred Work of Grief. (North Atlantic Books, 2015) This book is an instruction manual for those who understand that as the author writes, “Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty.” (xviii) But what more does an apprenticeship with sorrow offer us? Do we merely discharge our grief and move on?

Francis Weller On Navigating Our Losses

Psychologist Robert Romanyshyn speaks to this as the value of melancholy. He describes it as “the result of a grief endured, the deep wisdom of the soul which recognizes that life is about loss, and that love tempered by grief, allows one to cherish the ordinary, simple moments of everyday life, even as we know they are passing away.” Weller: Expressing grief has always been a challenge. The main difference between our society and societies in the past is how private we are with it today. Through most of human history grief has been communal. The Pueblo people of the Southwest, for example, have “crying songs” to help move grief along. The Mohawk traditions have the “condolence ritual,” where they tend to the bereaved with an elegant series of gestures, such as wiping tears from the eyes with the soft skin of a fawn. The healers in those traditions know it is not good to carry grief in the body for a long time. The Wild Edge of Sorrow is extraordinary. I'm going to be giving it to a lot of people. So many of the themes explored are things I care deeply about. For example, the betrayal of our Great Expectation that life is supposed to be far more magical, authentic, intimate, and alive than what has been offered to us as normal. The ongoing pain of separation from community and nature that we all feel. And the pain of the earth. Reading Weller’s book, I've realized that we have a lot of unprocessed grief to share. This book will be a gift to many." - Charles Eisenstein, author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible