Nothing has changed. Everything has changed.

My friends, we are in a grace period. We have about 2 months until the ground will rapidly shift under our feet.

Most days I find myself lamenting. The rush by most mainstream news media to get back to normal— their blow by blow reporting of the daily news— just doesn’t do justice to the coming apart of a 250 year old experiment with democracy. The bones have been picked over and are wasting.

I’ve stopped listening.

The spiritual pundits calling us to find joy in small things, and cheerfully look for the silver lining in daily life, just doesn’t settle well with me.

I know I need to keep breathing. Stay focused on gratitude. Keep my eyes centered on what matters, what has meaning.

But grief is a spiritual practice too. It is a way to sit shiva with the soul.

I believe our deepest soul powers are unleashed in our marrow when we get down to releasing the grief in our bones. Herein lies our full humanity. Grief connects us to our heart and one another. We remember that we all are living an experiment— an impermanent condition called ‘being human’.
I know I cannot imagine new worlds until I properly let go of and lament what is no more—and accept “What Is”.

Francis Weller, Wild Edge of Grief (Berkeley, CA; North Atlantic Books, 2015) writes about the Five Gates of Grief.

Gate 1 Everything we love we will lose

Gate 2 Grieving the places that have not known love

Gate 3 The sorrows of the world

Gate 4 What we expected and did not receive

Gate 5 Ancestral Grief

Mostly I lament the steroid driven fossil fuel industry’s assault on the earth and land based people— which the current economic system and powers that be, have already normalized. It will only be heightened under this new U.S. administration. That’s a promise. Unbridled greed will be normalized, brazenly welcomed into the halls of power.

The prophets of ages past still live in my belly. They cry out that their bones have “turned to dust”, thundering down their prescient clarity about the greedy who seize power and destroy the earth and all her inhabitants.

Earth might be the place of my greatest sorrow, but she is also where I find solace. As Priscilla Stuckey writes in a Nov. 26, 2024 Substack Post, “Caring for the Earth: Post election edition”, the remedy is earth herself.

The best remedy I know for a broken heart is to get closer to nature. And the best place to do that is your local area. Your home. This is a time to connect with trees in your neighborhood, to watch the play of light through branches that may now be bare of leaves, to welcome the birds that live with you in winter. This is a time to breathe in the gift of oxygen provided by trees and plants (and plankton), to lean against a tree and feel the scrape of its bark and the strength of its trunk. To ask a tree how to cope, and then to sit and listen for an answer.

As we head towards the darker, colder days of Winter Solstice here in the northern hemisphere…if you aren’t feeling the bright lights and holiday cheer, if you find yourself needing to sit with sackcloth and ashes on your forehead at one of the Gates of Grief, know that you aren’t alone

I leave you with a small glimmer of hope in that place…

How do we listen/ when the world’s noise fills every corner/how do we hold each other’s pain/when our own hearts are stretched thin as a thread?

What does WITH look like in a divided world/can it sound like music/rising from different rooms, harmonizing?

What do we owe do each other/when we’re all feeling the weight/when our journeys twist like rivers/& we can’t see the end?

Maybe it’s not what we do/but how we meet in the middle, how we turn walls into doors/how we remember our voices are threads/stitching this world/together. (Kiyaana Cox Jones, M.S.)