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| ISSUE NO. 677 |
| THE EXCLAMATION OF 'GOOD GRIEF' . . . is an expression of alarm or dismay, the embodiment of frustrated dismissal or despair. It's an understandable way to feel in response to the ways our society centers profits over people. Nearly 50 years after Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the ills of prioritizing poverty, policing, and oppression over building systems of support and care, we still find ourselves still here. As Dr. King said, “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.” A dedicated holiday does not honor the work of MLK or any other activists, civil rights leaders, or humanitarians, as much as doing our own work each day to dismantle the systems that do not serve any of us and erecting structures of support in their place. As Audre Lorde reminds us, "The testimony of your daily living is the missing remnant in the fabric of our future." For today, our testimony, our remnant, is grief. Grief: something that, in our modern American culture, we tend avoid at all costs. We think grief is something better left alone, to do the frightening work that we don't know how to do. Even when our rituals pay respect, they are often isolated to events with a finite start and end time, like a wake or funeral, leaving a failure of recognition around the long-term and unruly unfolding of emotion that is required when we grapple with love and loss. Grief's associations with discomfort may reflexively turn people off, especially when we are urged to pursue what is warm, fun, and bright. Binary thinking imposes its either / or frame, that by paying attention to grief - and the death or loss that permeates it - means you are turning away from living, and the love and joy that accompany the vibrancy of life. As many thought leaders have reminded us (not least Marisa Renee Lee with her book, Grief is Love) grief and love are two sides of the same rubber band: pulling on one side stretches the other, thereby expanding our capacity. Tapping into grief is the thing that brings the joy that we need to balance out our pain. Grief itself is an expression of love, and the weight of your grief is directly proportional to the magnitude of the love that you feel. Allowing yourself to feel that love is critical to being alive. We have learned over the years that grief is something one can't ultimately escape, no matter how fast you run. Pretending we can put off the inevitable makes it loom larger - gives it all the more power over us. The act of avoiding grief causes it to creep up in the most insidious ways, resulting in so much more suffering than sitting with it to begin with. So the question becomes: how do we sit in our grief? And the answer is the same as we find in most of our questions: in community. You are not alone in your grief. And when we truly face it together - we can reimagine and initiate a more beautiful and bountiful world. What are you grieving right now? Let us share your load. We can make this place beautiful, together. We are right here with you, Tay + Dor |
tidbits...resources on anti-racism, environmentalism and food culture AKA stuff we're reading / listening to / watching / noticing / thinking about / captivated by this Tuesday . . . |
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