Hear

We are the product of several generations of ungrieved wounds. Focused on survival, our ancestors had little choice but to retaliate or repress the wrongs that had been done to them, so that they could persevere. But with so few elders in our midst who teach about the importance of grieving, or who create culture and ritual around honouring grief, we fee alone with our private suffering. We rarely witness the grief of others because of it cultural taboo, causing us to believe our own grief is shameful and weird. 

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Learning to grieve well must begin with the self. There are ruins in each of us. A place where 'what once was' lives on like an echo, haunting the landscape of our lives with its weathered foundations. Abandoned, scavenged, and dismantled by time, the ruin is the holiest place in our heart. It is the ways in which we have been broken that have earned us a place to stand. It is in our life's absences that a wild longing is born. This ruined place is a temple in which to worship, to throw down our grief and forgetting, and praise what remains. After all, these remains are the evidence of how greatly we have loved and they should be venerated as the legacy of survival that they are. 

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The events of your loss, the discrepancies in your upbringing, the deficits in your making, are what shape you uniquely. Your limitations are what give rise to the imagination, and your regrets are what put you into right relationship with your future. So you must bless every grief you've encountered on your exquisite and treacherous courtship of Self, for they've made you the slow diamond that you are...If each of us has the tenacity to retrieve the elixirs of our discomforts, our combined medicine can heal the collective wound.