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Marilyn Flower · Follow

Oct 16, 2021 · 6 min read

At the Wild Edge of Sorrow, Grief and Love

Embrace
Opening to them both becomes a spiritual journey full of light

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground ~ Oscar Wilde

I’m not used to thinking of sorrow as a spiritual practice.

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At the Wild Edge of Sorrow, Grief and Love Embrace | by Marilyn Fl... https://medium.com/change-your-mind/at-the-wild-edge-of-sorrow-gri...

But it sure seems to pile on thick this time of year.

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A dear friend lost her aunt last month. An aunt I had shared a visit or two with, full
of light and laughter.

Another friend passed away in a local nursing home. Before I could get my act
together to go visit him. All of us who knew and loved him hope he did not die alone.
But we may never find out.

We lost a local actress~poet~friend who channeled the spirit of Emily Dickenson

and put on one-woman shows. She was a regular at our monthly poetry readings
and we featured her once to a packed house. She stopped coming when we had to
switch to Zoom.

Some say death comes in threes. But there’s a pandemic raging. We all know folks
who have been impacted in some ways, if not the ultimate.

Grief in the time of COVID looks and feels different.

My friend’s uncle was afraid to set a date for a memorial. Some of the family live in
the deep south where the virus stats are high and the protective actions are low. He
didn’t want the risk. He’s scared. Like many of us.

Normally we’d have a memorial for our friend in our church, with a celebratory feast
afterward in our garden cottage. But we’re not yet open, thanks to the pandemic.
Zoom does not feel like a fitting place to honor him. We can’t break bread together,
cry on each other’s shoulders, or hug.

With COVID, we’re all experiencing some degree of grief.

For loved ones lost, for ways of life lost, for a more familiar world, we may never get
back. Ever.

So if she wasn’t already, grief is our companion now.

Invited or not. Like it or not. Ready or not. She’s here.

Not necessarily a bad thing, I’m learning.

Sure, our death-denying society will tell you otherwise. Grief is the intrusion. The
unwelcome stranger who sweeps into the party, guzzles all the fancy wine, grabs the

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delicacies, stuffs them into her pockets, sits in the middle of the circle, and hogs the
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conversation.

If there’s dancing to be had, she grabs folks, squeezing them too hard and not letting
go.

Or at least, that’s how it feels. Our bodies tense. Pain kicks inside our hearts. So we
keep her at arm’s length or wall her off completely.

But guess what?

When we wall off our grief and sorrow, we wall off our love, too.
Grief and love may sound like extreme ends of a continuum. But they’re deeply
interconnected. Anything or anyone we love, we can lose. Often in the blink of an
eye, without warning. Or time to prepare.

Such is the dance of life. And the paradox of Spirit.

We can learn to accept, embrace, and dance with its natural order of things.

Opening our hearts fully to grief opens them more fully to love.

When I learn of someone close’s passing, my day softens. My heart opens to the pain
of someone facing death alone, family members unable to be there, and the tears in
the fabric of our lives left by loss.

Exchanging messages of solace and support, reading the ones that drift in, bathes
my day in a tender light. My usual hectic pace slows, my breathing deepens.

Urgent deadlines dissolve. Priorities shift.

Space and sky and mind and words and love and friendship and peace all break open
before me, like when fog lifts, revealing dawn’s glorious light.

If I could have these loved ones back instead of all that, I would. In the meantime,
I’m noticing how being present to inevitable grief and loss opens me to light and
love.

Grieving brings us in touch with ‘The Wild Edge of Sorrow.’

That’s the poetic name of a very poetic book I’m reading by psychotherapist and

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At the Wild Edge of Sorrow, Grief and Love Embrace | by Marilyn Fl... https://medium.com/change-your-mind/at-the-wild-edge-of-sorrow-gri...

writer, Francis Weller MFT. He leads a cancer circle and walks many miles with his
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own grief, as well as that of friends, family, and clients.

He urges us not to resist, wall off, or push away grief. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow:
Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, he says:

Every one of us must undertake an apprenticeship with sorrow. We must learn the art
and craft of grief, discover the profound ways it ripens and deepens us. While grief is an
intense emotion, it is also a skill we develop through a prolonged walk with loss. Facing
grief is hard work….It takes outrageous courage to face outrageous loss. This is precisely
what we are being called to do.

There are layers upon layers of grief we’re called to own and heal.

He calls these the five gates of grief.

The first gate is everything we love, we will lose.

In the words of twelfth-century poet, Emmanuel of Rome:

’Tis a fearful thing

To love
What death can touch.
To love, to hope, to dream,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
Love,
But a holy thing,
To love what death can touch.

The second gate may surprise you. It did me. The places that have not known love.
These are places inside ourselves we’ve banished in shame and despair. We can’t
grieve something we deem unworthy of love. This work is to love those rejected
parts of ourselves.

Gate number three is the sorrows of the world. This may feel like a bottomless pit,
especially when we bring the pain of a dying planet into this heart work. Recent
events such as the earthquake in Haiti, the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, and
many more serve to break our hearts open if we’re willing.

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After a personal pain breaks my heart open, I somehow seem to have room for and
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willingness to embrace and shed these global tears.

There’s a fourth gate: What we expected and did not receive.

Like a long-awaited pregnancy that miscarried. Literally in my case. I minimized this

sorrow because it was so early on. The unacknowledged hole left in my heart was
much bigger than the tiny tissue left in my toilet.

Is there a well deep in me full of unshed tears?

Why should I weep when so many live babies and children lie hungry at night, or are
forced to flee during those nights, or both. Maybe the sorrows of the world circle me
back to sorrows of my own.

Could it be that tears are just tears after all? Once they flow, they’re too numerous to
attach names to.

Ancestral grief is the final fifth gate. Here Weller says:

This is the grief we carry in our bodies from sorrows experienced by our
ancestors….Tending this undigested grief of our ancestors not only frees us to live our
own lives, but also eases ancestral suffering in the other world.

Oy vey, does this gate speak to us ones with Jewish roots. It doesn’t take much
imagination to hear wails behind the walls of ghettos, shtetls, and concentration
camps.

All peoples have history tugging at their heartstrings. Do we have enough tears in us
to heal our broken world?

Crying is cleansing. Tears release toxins as they clear out our consciousnesses. The
world shimmers after a good cry. No wonder grief keeps showing up. She knows we
need her, even as we dread her visit.

Let me close with this, again from Weller:

There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange
between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this I have
come to have a lasting faith in grief.

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At the Wild Edge of Sorrow, Grief and Love Embrace | by Marilyn Fl... https://medium.com/change-your-mind/at-the-wild-edge-of-sorrow-gri...

I’m just starting on that faith walk. You’re welcome to join me. Namaste.
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Marilyn Flower writes political humor and satire to delight socially and spiritually
conscious folks. She’s the author of Creative Blogging: Ninja Writers Guide to
Character Development and Bucket Listers, Get Your Brave On: How to Do the Thing
You’re ‘Too Old’ & ‘Too Scared’ to Do. Clowning and improvisation strengthen her
resolve during these crazy times. Stay in touch!

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