Grief is a ritual I have often witnessed as a deep inhale. Sucking it down into the lungs and disappearing it away.
I remember questions around when my grandad was close to death. Did he know? The eldest man in the family, who was sent to war aged 14 not seen as capable of holding his own mortality in heart. The little white lies that litter our language create such blind spots when it comes to the soul’s knowing. All my life spirit has shown me something so clearly. For life to begin again in new forms, deaths must be consciously grieved. Whether that be that the life of the bereaved, the entry into spirit realm, life after divorce and injury or redundancy it is that grief and grieving is the ceremony of endings and emotions our souls deeply understand.
When our souls don’t know that we loop and don’t land fully in the life we have ahead. The grief that isn’t fully borne witness. The grief in the corner, at the pit of the lungs not yet spoken or brought into the dance. The grief that is inhaled and absorbed and forgotten. Felt but not witnessed in its truth and essence. Are we really here and did that just happen?
The grief that is held by the land in places where war has ended lives is this. The bodies that have died in battle taken into the arms of the Goddess and the trees held with love but not returning to heaven. Not through lack of purity or holiness but through lack of grief and the bone knowing of death. The untold stories, the knowing, the breath of song, the essence unspoken. This is what attracted me to dance flamenco, the grief in the dance and song. I could feel it and knew it was a story my body wanted to tell.
I sensed and released the grief on the land where I live, where in those times the war of the roses met the struggle for the boarders; where the Templars and the druids peregrinated sacred sites of the love of the Goddess through waterfalls and trees; the ley lines and the star lines constellating the mountainous rock beings standing proud and majestic. This land where women were walked to Gallows Hill and testified as witches. I knew that before building, before bringing anything to those lands, they must be heard like the souls who died there.
What could I feel in the roots and the words in the land? Those who have died in battle without knowing they have died. How could that be? Surely, when you die you fully know? Apparently not. I sensed into such panic sudden deaths and confusion held in the land. The not knowing. The souls that left the bodies and sought refuge in another to shield the blow and is at once found yet eternally lost.
What the soul does not fully understand it does not process. It does not fully move and it becomes stuck. Like the wild tansy, the plant ally of death growing in the funnels of wind that passed through the top of the valley, it spoke of cleansing, purification and movement. The life to be lived beyond this.
Grief isn’t a stopping or a shutdown as I had witnessed. I learnt that grief asked for ceremony movement, song, dance, truth, for all of the airways and waterways to open and empty in honour of death. I have been shown prisons and castles where prisoners’ souls were to be released in ceremony by the release of shame. Touching the frequency of the truth of the emotion was the ceremony of psychopomp to the Summerland. All of us have soul work and the release of souls from the land and stones is part of mine. I have been shown more and more and the more I travel, the simpler and deeper it becomes. My mantra has become, feel, express, release, restore to the Goddess.
The grief that asks that life begins again is one that knows deeply what has happened and chooses the onward journey with grace. It is hope like the yellow blossoming of gorse in the winter from the prickly branches out on a limb.
Grief is sometimes holding the invisible truths only you and the dead know existed. An intimacy that feels undermined by the lack of tangible breath and pulse yet the emotions and relationship in the body. When my friend died in his fifties, for most who knew him, his soul was at ease but in the moments of his passing I felt such anger that found its way to me with a question. Who am I and what has happened? Often the fragments are the parts of the soul lost in this lifetime which do not travel when the rest of the soul makes it’s journey. I journeyed him in my boat with my allies. I learnt of the entanglements of this lifetime and spoke the words to remedy his soul. It is my bone mothering I have done since being so small.
Grief can be loud like the bells, I know the wisdom in the expression. Like the Keening of Brigit at the battlefield. Bodies must purge so regularly and not hold, like the autumn leaves and the howling gales. Grief must strip us bare again and again for us to live in truth beyond this time. For life to turn the wheel and say ‘now’ now, we may enter into the life again.
It is these ceremonies which hold the unseen and the wordless times to their new dawn. Ceremony saves us. It holds up a neon sign to our souls on every sense and felt sensual level that something so earth shattering has happened and life will never be the same. Ceremony says the night has fallen but the sun will shine again. Ceremony is the wordless actions we do when life gets to continue and our bodies pull back and our breath holds deep in our lungs retreating.
I stood singing in the methodist church at my Grandma’s funeral. My eyes streaming with tears as I sung “Make me a channel of your peace” all around me dry eyes and emotional avoidance. Sometimes we know that when we finally open to grief it will pour and surge. This is the reason for the damning of the well.
Fifteen years later I journeyed into my womb when I was consciously remembering this path again. I returned and found her there speaking to me from that same church in the coffin. The part that hadn’t felt the ceremony. The part that didn’t fully know. The part that the service didn’t touch. I entered the healing space with her there. I came to her in her coffin and dressed her in the blue dress she asked me, her dancing shoes and the big band music on the turntable. She danced off that day, all the way to the Lord God she prayed to her whole life. I saw them embrace as he received her. The part that wanted a fuss, she got it in the end. All souls need it. Psychopomp work isn’t always in the now. It’s about giving ourselves what we need like inner child healing for the dead. I’ve witness photos of the deceased transform with this work. The light comes in, eyes twinkle and frowns dissolve posthumously and the rest in peace is deepened.
Deep grief changes the living in ways we can never imagine until we witness it. Until we unravel from the fragments and give it to the light, grief is inert.
Yet grief, the feeling love lost transformed and witnessing the return to spirit is the spark of newness. The rebirth in the ashes.
When we grieve we touch it. We know what it is to be truly here and mortal
We see the edges, the past, future and present,
Our place, which way we are facing
And we see the spark, the life
Pulsing inside us letting us know
We’re alive