UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Francis Weller. Francis is a psychotherapist, a writer, and a soul activist. His 2015 book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, is a book that I would call an underground classic, a book that people talk to each other about. In it, he invites us into what he calls an apprenticeship with sorrow. We’re invited to meet grief in its many different forms. Francis has introduced thousands of people to grief rituals and their healing power, and he also trains people in how to hold space for such rituals. He’s writing a new book, it’s called In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Crisis, and I have a great deal of enthusiasm and heart for this conversation. Francis, welcome.
Francis Weller: Thank you, Tami. It’s such a pleasure to be here with you. After knowing about you and listening to you for many years, it’s an honor to be sitting with you today.
TS: An apprenticeship with sorrow.
FW: Yes.
TS: Let’s start there, with what that means.
FW: Well, it derives from the fact that grief is never far from our hearts. Every single day we’ll touch some threat of sorrow, whether it’s roadkill or seeing the condition of our culture or losing someone we love or grief will be around us all the time. Now, if we’re not capable of working with that material, the tendency is one of contraction, of shutting down. And then this grief doesn’t just sit there passively, it becomes this mantle of oppression. People come into my office frequently complaining of depression, but when I listen to them, it’s not depression, it’s oppression. It’s the unmetabolized sorrows that have settled like sediment on their beings and they’re carrying this weight around. We’re not taught how to work with grief, how to accompany it, how to befriend it. So most of our relationship with grief is very unnerving, unsettled. The goal is to how far away can I get from it?
But the apprenticeship says no, this is a companion that we need to become familiar with and skillful at. So grief isn’t just an emotion, it’s a human capacity to take in the sorrows of the world and metabolize that into medicine for the community. And that’s what we’re missing to a great degree in this culture is that capacity to see how grief softens the heart, opens the heart so that we can register what is moving in the ambient field. And right now the ambient field is saturated with grief and anxiety, fear, uncertainty. And again, if we don’t have a skillset to process that, our primary response is one of shutting down and closing out. So the apprenticeship is something that is a lifelong process.
TS: Tell me more what you mean by metabolizing. That’s a word you hear, people use it, therapists use it. People who are deep in their process work use it. And I think externally, some people are like, what are you talking about?
FW: Well, it’s that same idea, Tami, that grief isn’t just something to endure, it’s something to engage. So grief, we tend to think about how do I get to the other shore? How do I get to this side of this grief? Not a bad idea. It’s nice to work our way through, but to actually engage the material through writing, through dream work, through imagination, through ritual, through dance and through art. That’s helping you take the grief and work it in an alchemical way so that what’s hidden inside every grief is a medicine. It’s like the medicine that comes with losing someone we love is a medicine of vulnerability. I that’s a medicine that medicine comes with. Recognizing our relationship to the earth is one of entanglement, that there is no separation. What’s happening to the glaciers is happening in my own being. What’s happening to the caribou or anything is happening in my own being.
I think I shared one of the stories in the book about the Gulf oil spill in 2010 and how I’d wake up in the middle of the night crying, hearing the sounds of dolphins dying and shorebirds suffocating, and that was 2000 miles away. But my psyche didn’t say that. It said it’s immediate, it’s intimate. That’s my body also suffering. So the metabolizing of this material is how do I work it? How do I engage it creatively, imaginatively, artfully, ritualistically to help it move along, not to become what I want it to become, but for it to become what it wants to become. Does that make sense? It’s like there’s an intentionality in grief to deepen, ripen open our beings so that we’re in a constant conversation as room, you would say with the world.
TS: You mentioned the skillset that we can bring to this process, and there are two skills or capacities that you write about in The Wild Edge of Sorrow that I want to hear more about and learn more about. I’ve never heard them quite explained in this way. One is that you say, we can offer our grief a bottom. And I thought, I want to hear more about this because from my own underworld descent, if you will, when I’ve been in such a period, there are times when it just feels like I’ve dropped in a hole and I am just dropping. I don’t feel the bottom. So I’m like, what does this mean when Francis says we can learn how to offer a bottom to our grief?
FW: That’s a really important question. Most of the people I’ve worked with in here, but also in ritual settings, they weren’t shown how to create a bottom for their grief. So whenever you get near it, there’s a certain anxiety. It’s like I almost rarely ever see a pure grief moment. I see a grief, panic moment when the grief comes up, there’s almost a panic that comes along like, oh, I dunno, I can swear on the word. You’re welcome, welcome, whatever. Oh shit, I’m going to be drowning in this. I’m going to be in free fall forever. Well, that’s because they were never taught that there is actually a place to hold the grief. The other part that makes it feel bottomless is that we’ve been asked to carry our grief privately and in a sense we can’t manufacture our own bottom. It’s a collaborative process. When the community gathers for any particular loss and we take it into ritual, we take it into conversation, we take it into practices. I learned that I can drop in and I can return. That’s the value of having a bottom in a sense. The bottom is the way that we generate faith, that this is not a territory that’s going to take me hostage. It’s actually a nutrient dense territory that’s here to, in a sense, deepen and open me up to more of my capacities to be human. Did I answer your question? I’m hoping.
TS: I think you’re pointing towards the answer. Maybe it would help if you could share with me in your own experience how you discovered a sense of being held in some way that there was a bottom in grieving.
FW: Well, I’ve been a lifelong associate with melancholy. That’s been an energy that’s accompanied me my whole life, and I can give historical reasons for that. I don’t know if that’s history or soul or character temperament, but what I had to learn is how to relinquish a certain heroic fiction. The heroic ideal is the primary one we have in this culture, and the heroic ideal is always rising above being successful, being in control, never falling apart, and that ideology prohibits us from actually asking for what we need to create the bottom. So what I had to do was out of my own pain and my own grief and loneliness was I had to in a sense confess myself, fallible and human as young would say, and telling a few people about what I was carrying, and their response allowed me to fall into a space to be held.
See, grief requires two things as I wrote about containment and release. But if it’s a solo project, you can’t do both jobs. So you become a chronic containment field for your sorrow. What we need, our spaces and places, friendships, circles, communities where we don’t have to be the one doing the containment. We step into a container and through that we begin to feel like I’m going to be held and I only have one job to do at that moment, which is to Christ, to weep Mr to whales, to bellow. So that helps you give a greater sense of faith that I will be held adequately in this time. And then as you become more aware of it, you become a place of holding others in grief and we begin to enter this exquisite ecology, the sacred knowing that at any given moment, I’ll be the one on my knees and you’ll be the one holding me or vice versa.
That’s just the truth, particularly as we become more and more engaged with what I call the long dark, which is where we are now, right now as a planet or in the long dark, and in this time things will continue to break down. There will be layers and layers of collapse psychologically, economically, socially. I just wrote a forward for the book by Dwayne Elgin called Choosing Earth, and it was a hard book to read because he does the next seven decades and forecasts what’s most likely a possible probable outcome of each of these decades, and it was scary or very scary, and so I ended up writing that the keynote for the coming decades, maybe two generations at least, will be grief. So we need to know that there is a bottom to this. We need to know that there are practices. We need to know that I can take up an apprenticeship, otherwise the time ahead will be just overwhelmingly difficult. That’s not to say there won’t be beauty and joy and love and absolutely, but our capacity to register those things is hinging upon our capacity to stay open in our heart and our soul, which means I need to know how to process the material of grief.
TS: And it sounds like part of the key to this holding space is other people the notion of coming together with other people supporting us and then us supporting other people, that this can’t be an isolated journey and be successful, and that may be part of the reason why it’s so hard for so many of us to understand what it means to find a bottom. We’re not used to saying, oh, this is going to be a communal engagement, right?
FW: No, no. That heroic ideal is a form of solitary confinement. We’re forced to walk alone with this material and it’s unbearably difficult to do that. So again, we shut down just to survive and not have no judgments about anesthesia, the way that we have to kind of immune ourself from some of the emotional material that’s out there until we find a place to hold it. Community also is more than human too, by the way. You can sit in a grove of trees and feel held. You can sit along the creek bed and weep into the have your tears fall into that moving water. The world holds us as well. The main thing is to not think of it in isolation. I was going to bed in 2020 just before the election occurred, pretty despairing thinking that, oh, well, we’re going to have a repeat of this story. And I was literally, my leg was just about to get into bed when my body turned around and walked me over to a bookshelf and reached for a particular book, pulled it off the shelf. It was Linda Hogan’s book, dwellings the Chickasaw poet and writer. I opened the book to the chapter, all my relations. I realized in that moment of despair, I had forgotten all my relations. I was an isolated cell feeling helpless, powerless, impotent.
And so I began to remember the dug fur and the redwoods and the star clusters and the moon and the tad poles and that despair lifted. But getting into what I call village mind or communal mind is very difficult for us in white, western, industrial, technological, economic, capitalistic culture. It’s hard, but that’s what we do at every grief ritual is we slowly peel away some of the layers of individualism and remind people of their capacity to become part of something larger. And that permission, I can’t tell you how often Tami, in the middle of the ritual, you get a feeling that this is what I’ve been waiting for and what I wrote about in the fourth gate of grief, what we expected and did not receive, that grief is right there in that moment. This is what I’ve been waiting for. I’ve been too alone with this, too isolated, too cut off. So when it shows up, there’s a recognition of that space and that itself has helped us with giving it a bottom.
TS: You write about how it took you attending your third grief ritual until tears flowed from you. What happened during that third grief ritual?
FW: Well, it was a moment of surprise. I mean, I was about to engage the same pattern. I knew there was grief there, but I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t express it, I couldn’t touch it. And then a friend of mine came up and just put his hand on my shoulder and that was it. That was it. Nothing mysterious or magical, but it had that sense of touching into my psyche telling me I wasn’t alone in this moment. And I got it not through my brain, but through my body, and instantly I was on my knees for three hours sobbing, and that was like my entry back into the world. Then there’s a certain way, as I say to people in my office, they’ll say something like, if I go there, I’m never coming back. If I go into that grief room, that’s it. And I usually say, if you don’t go there, you’re never coming back. Because so much of our life force, our vitality or our sense of wonder and joy is blocked off when we live in that sense of narrow confinement, what I call the flat line culture. We don’t go to joy because we can’t go to sorrow. They are absolutely interrelated. That was in West Africa years ago, and I remember saying to woman, you have so much joy, and her immediate response was, that’s because I cry a lot.
We never make that association. If you’re crying, you’re depressed. We make the association that crying is depression, but it is not depression. Grief is incredibly alive. It’s wild and feral, and it’s not a deadening place at all. It’s difficult, no doubt, but it’s not deadening, it’s enlivening.
TS: You mentioned this phrase, Francis, the long dark. Is that something that you came up with? Yeah, yeah. It’s a very powerful image, and I’ve heard you say that coming to your grief rituals now, in the early days it was people who were dealing primarily with their own losses in their lives, but now more than half the people are actually feeling some sense of grief about the state of our world. And it seems like you’re in a growing enterprise here offering grief rituals over the next few decades, and I just wonder if you can say more about that and the role of grieving during the long dark.
FW: Yeah. When I first began offering rituals back in the late nineties, early two thousands, I had to convince people to come that they, why would I want to spend a weekend crying? I mean so many great TV shows on, but eventually, I remember when I, in 2011 or so, I first self-published this book because no publisher was interested in a grief book at that point. So I self-published it and I remember going to a book reading once and the people were very friendly and warm, the owners of the place, and they gave us a little lunch and said, if just a handful of people come, we’ll just sit in a circle and you can read and we can talk. I said, that’s great. I have no expectations. He came out a little later and said, there’s quite a crowd gathering. Came out later and said, it’s standing room only.
That wasn’t for me because no one knew my name at that point, but the theme we were talking about grief and the place was packed. Something happened in the middle of this last two decades where the denial began to break, and that’s one of my hopes right now if I have any hope right now, it’s that the denial is breaking and more and more people, I mean you start reading stuff out in the internet, there’s a whole lot of stuff about grief out there right now that wasn’t there 10 years ago that was not there. People weren’t offering grief rituals. And so to see that happening is actually encouraging to me that we’re actually going to hold this territory. And the consequence of that and the terms of the long dark is that we get to stay current. Part of the beauty of doing grief work is it gets you into the current moment.
Most of us are facing our past, not only our past, but our generations past. We rarely feel like we’re living in the present moment. The pool is chronically towards the old wounds. And so what I love about the grief work is it actually gets me here. I’m in the current moment, and the only ones who can respond meaningfully to the long dark are those who get to stay current, that they are present to register what’s happening to our collective body, to our ecological systems, and provide a context for them to stay current. Because many times we have environmental activists come to our rituals and they’re burnt out. That’s an ironic term, burnt out because what they’re actually doing is drowning in sorrow. They have no outlets for this grief, so all of their passion turns into smoke and ash, and so to keep them current, to keep them available, regular visits to the grief shrine, if we were a sane culture, there’d be a grief ritual in every community at least once a month.
But we’re not a sane culture. We have people coming from Australia and England and Canada and all across the United States, and it’s wonderful to come to our rituals, but that is at the heart of the trouble is have to travel. What is it? 8,000 miles from Australia for the privilege of crying with other human beings. That’s a core symptom of our times, is what we have forgotten. It’s what I call about, the amnesia and the anesthesia. We have forgotten so much of what we need in order to stay alive and open and engaged and participating in the joys and sorrows of the world.
TS: You make this very important connection and you’re hitting on it between being current and are aliveness, and this seems so important to you. And so I wonder if you can say more about that.
FW: Yeah, it brings me right back to that heroic ideal of control, and there’s a certain way that that requirement of being in control, there’s also a way of deadening us, and so we then rely upon stimulation and stimulants and excitement, but rarely do we touch joy that’s not in the same category. So part of what I feel is that our ability to know this territory is what keeps us closest to our aliveness. Like I say, when you’re in the midst of your grief, you’re anything but passive or still you’re on the ground at times. You’re rolling, you’re crying. It’s very vital, very alive, but that’s where we need to have faith in it again, that it’s not a place to be caught perpetually, eternally. It’s a place that actually allows us to feel our being. I remember coming home from a retreat one time with my friend Richard, and he said, so Francis, are you happy? I have moments. I have moments of being happy. I says, but I’ve given up trying to be happy in this happiness culture. When I’m not happy, I feel like I was failing. So what I want is to be alive, and every one of these emotions has vitality in them. Sorrow has vitality, anger has vitality. I want to be able to feel into what is alive in my body and in my soul, and I don’t want to try to narrow it down to one acceptable emotional terrain of happiness. It’s lovely, but that ain’t life.
TS: Now you mentioned Francis, that when we’re grieving, it can be messy, it can be challenging, it can be difficult, and this brings me to another skill that we can and need to develop according to your writing in our apprenticeship with sorrow that I have some questions about, which is staying present in our adult self when we’re grieving and you write how we can regress into a childlike state when we’re grieving. And I was like, yeah, that’s right. And I know that place, and I think many of us do, and it’s like, how am I supposed to stay in my adult self when I’m covered with snot and my face is in the ground? How am I doing that?
FW: Well, who said that’s not adult? So that’s very adult. It takes great courage and muscle to let yourself go there. I think only the adult can let us really go there in a present sense. In a current sense. The child might go there, those child parts of us might go there more out of a feeling of desperation or loneliness, but to engage that material I think is very adult. What I mean by the whole thing, and we could spend several hours talking about this one topic, it’s so important is either, again, in here in my office or in ritual spaces, you’ll see something happen to someone’s face where they’re touching into something and suddenly they look like a terrified three-year-old. And frequently someone will say something like, I got to get out of here. It’s not safe.
This isn’t safe. I got to go. And I’ll stop and just say, can you pause for a second and turn toward that party that’s afraid and let it know that you see it? And the moment they do that, they do this incredible little alchemical move of separation, and the moment you separate from it, you have a chance to be the adult for it, and that’s when the adult can hold that space. So even in the midst of deep, deep grief, there’s an adult presence there that says, I’m right here. This is hard. I’m falling apart right now, but I’m being held. There’s others with me. So the adult presence, only the adult can process grief meaningfully. Those trial states, the skillset aren’t there. They’re all about endurance and survival, which is great. We want to endure. We want to survive, but there’s no movement of the grief.
Alchemy says you have to keep the material warm for it to move. That’s the job of the adult, to bring compassion, to bring empathy, to bring warmth, to bring attention, to bring effort like writing or dancing or singing or whatever. The adult has the ability to keep that material warm so it can stay moving. We don’t want grief to solidify and harden. Let’s call congestive heart failure, isn’t it? And that’s a big factor for a lot of our people dying is their hearts are congested with sorrow. So to keep it moving, to keep it warm is part of the skillset of the apprenticeship, and the adult is the only one who can do that.
TS: So as you’re talking, it almost seems to me that there are sort of two channels happening, if you will. One is this witnessing loving awareness that is holding in a space of compassion, a grieving process that’s happening that could feel more childlike and both are happening at once. Is that an accurate reflection of what you’re saying?
FW: Yeah, yeah. If you think about it, the adult has that capacity through self-compassion to ask to be held, whereas the child doesn’t think there’s anybody there to hold them. The child anticipates being all alone with this grief. That’s again, that’s part of not having a bottom, is that very few of us had our grief adequately held in our family situations. So when it comes up, that’s who shows up for it. That’s the last association with grief was a child state, a lonely, isolated, inhaled state. So the adult has to come along and get enough separation from that, and with compassion, ask, I need to be held today. I can’t do this by myself, and only the adult can ask for that. The child will try to endure. And the adolescent state, which is always there, every child state has, it has its backside, an adolescent state that’s all about protection and trying to keep that part from feeling too exposed or too vulnerable. So that part gets tough. I don’t need anybody and tries to muscle through by themselves, but ultimately, as I’ve seen many, many times, the strategies begin to fail. And when the strategies fail, there’s an opportunity to come upon this material in different ways.
TS: Now, you mentioned if we lived in a healthy culture and that we’re far from it, there would be a grief shrine and there would be rituals monthly, regularly where we could go and have this type of movement and becoming current. But since that’s not the situation we’re in, what I noticed is after spending about four hours reading The Wild Edge of Sorrow and getting introduced to the five different gateways to grief that you write about, I closed the book and I said to my wife, I got to go into the forest and spend some time with the river. I was like, I got to go sit by a river, and I’ve got to just some ritual time where I put some stuff in the river and the river takes it away. Beautiful. And it was wonderful. It was very, I needed to do that. I was like, I got this stuff. It’s from the past. I got to put it in. And I’m wondering if you have other suggestions, things like that for rituals people can do right after they’re finished listening to us or even as they’re listening to us, but they don’t have to wait for the grief shrine that,
FW: Oh, yeah. The most basic one is after they listen to this to call a couple friends and say, I want to talk about loss, I want to talk about grief. Are you game and having three or four people gathered in a circle? Maybe you light a candle, maybe you see a poem or a prayer. But the intention is to begin to reveal what it is that we’re all carrying. Every person you meet on the street is saturated with grief, and what we’re waiting for is permission. Everyone is waiting for the permission to say, share. What’s that line of Mary Oliver’s? Tell me of despair yours. And I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. That’s what we’re waiting for is permission is to some space that just says, we’re going to talk about this, but we’re not going to get any advice. We’re not going to try to fix a damn thing because nothing’s broken.
Grief is not a place that needs to repair. It’s a presence awaiting, witnessing. And when we offer it, what it needs, it moves. It moves like you did in your beautiful ritual you just described, Tami’s. It moved because you gave it what it needed, a quality of attention, affection, care, compassion. You brought warmth to it, and you gave it a space to be recognized by the river, by the trees, by the stones. You weren’t alone with that, and you intuitively knew you needed to do that. I need to go do this. That’s also a part that I have deep faith in is what Yung call the unforgotten wisdom at the core of the psyche. Some part of us recognizes this rhythm when it’s offered or when we have an intuition. That’s what I need to do. I mean, I objected that it’s kind of what did that do?
You went to the river, but to the soul, that cadence, that rhythm was precisely what it was needing to do. And that’s what I see all the time at grief gatherings is that cadence is recognizable to what I call the archaic psyche. The old one in us recognizes that rhythm and that holding space as familiar. And when that frequency is offered, psyche knows what to do. We know that we can go to our knees. We know that we can bellow and protest out of outrage what is happening to our bodies or to our families or to our communities or to Gaza or to whatever. We can protest that. And that’s also a form of grief, by the way, is protest. It’s that part that says what’s happening is unacceptable. The losses are unacceptable. What’s happening to the forest or whatever is unacceptable. And I think it’s our sole responsibility, SOUL, our sole responsibility to register the losses of the world. If we don’t register them, who will? But again, that requires a heart being open and not encumbered by decades, generations of untouched unmetabolized grief.
TS: You wrote something under the five gates of grief that got my attention under the fifth gate of ancestral grief. And as you’re talking here about being current, this particularly got my attention. The more I sit in circle with people, the more I feel that all grief is ancestral grief. And I thought, huh, I need to understand that more all grief.
FW: Well, for instance, my own second gate grief was shame. And shame was one of those pernicious things that makes you feel very different and outside of the community. Now, for decades, I treated that as my trouble. My pain came to see it as my grief, but then I began to sit with it. This did not start with me. I’m the current curator of this story, but it began a long time ago. So this began not in my parents’ generation, probably multiple generations back. This sense of unworthiness began to take place in our bodies and our psyches. And now when I work with that material, I can say, I’m not only just working my own grief here, I’m weeping for all of what was unlived in my ancestors because they were also given a very narrow prescription of who they got to be. They couldn’t be too joyful, too happy, too exuberant, too delighted. They had to be serious, somber in control. Good Germans just stated the task. That means they also lost out. So that is part of what I’m saying is that these threads have long antecedents. Is that the right word? Antecedents to them. There’s a long string going back in time and probably also place.
TS: One of the questions I have about that is sometimes when I feel grief inside, is this mine? Is this part of my family lineage? Is this part of the world? Is it part of, I don’t know, a different dimension of being that I happen to be porous to what’s going on here? And I’m curious, do you think it’s important that we sort that out or it’s not important?
FW: I don’t think so. I think it, it’s just important that we honor it. So people say, well, I don’t know if I relate to that fourth gate of grief or this, it doesn’t matter. Each gate leads us to the communal chamber. It doesn’t matter which one you come in. We will all meet in the middle there and be in the commons of the soul, the territory we all recognize. It’s like when we open up our 30 or 40 people in a circle and everyone shares one thread of grief that they’ve come in with, and I’ll stop after it’s done and say, was there any grief you couldn’t relate to? I mean, you may not have had a child die by suicide or you may not have had a partner or divorce or whatever, but could you relate to it? Well, of course you can because sorrow is sorrow.
That’s the commons. I recognize that the grief in your face, I recognize the heaviness in your heart. Oh, I know you in this place. So what we begin to understand it is not so much my grief anymore, but ours. That’s what I want people to feel at the grief ritual. This is our grief and we’re collectively attending to the shared sorrows of being human in this moment at this time. And there’s something very healing about that move as well. Again, going back to this individualistic idea that I go to a grief ritual and if I didn’t cry, I failed. I didn’t get what I came for. But in a village mind thought, it says that if I’m participating in a circle of people and some of us grieve, we wept, we will all feel different when we leave here today. And again, if we’re smart, we’ll come back in a month and it’ll be my turn and you’ll support me. And it’s not that sense of I didn’t get it, but we were able to touch and empty some of our communal cup together. And there’s such exquisite beauty in that absolute beauty in that
TS: You write, there are a few things as genuine as a person grieving, and I think we all know that. We all recognize that. And the question that comes up for me is what would you say to someone who says, I somehow can’t let myself go there. I’m listening to this. I know there’s a welling up in me, but I can’t quite get to that genuine place.
FW: This is where that adult presence is helpful. It’s like you can imagine that something is frozen, something right is solidified. It’s gotten so dense, it can’t move. Well, you might have to sit there, you might have to put your hands on that frozen wall and just offer it. Your warmth, your affection, your care. It’s like me going back three times. I knew I had a boatload of grief and I just needed enough repetition to be around the field. I think because grief is so sequestered in our collective culture, we don’t see it very often. It’s not exposed. It’s like when I was in Africa, you can’t hide the grief. There’s no systems of distraction. It’s just right there. But here we need to be around it enough times, enough repetitions. But I still think that idea of just sitting with it softly, how soft can I be?
Can I put my arms around this? Can I let it know I’m here with you? Then eventually it will soften. It will move. I’ve seen that hundreds and hundreds of times. James Hillman quotes this alchemical tradition by saying, in your patience is your soul. We’re not a very patient people. We like things now quick, fast. But what you’re saying is going to require patience, learning to sit with it, to be with it, to notice it. How is it today? Is there any softening? Is there anything that it needs from me? So again, part of the apprenticeship is how do I hold this space and befriend who’s walking beside me and be part of that relationship and let it know that it’s not alone. It will soften. It will open. I have faith in griefs intent.
TS: It’s very interesting because you’ve said this now twice, this notion of an intent almost like a directionality, if you will, underneath grief, that it’s taking us someplace. And I wonder if you can share more about that.
FW: Well, we can imagine it almost in an initiatory sense. The griefs intention, I think, is to deepen, to broaden. Second one, I wrote about this period I went through for 19, 18, and 18 months just in that underworld territory you mentioned. And it was difficult. I was crying every day. I couldn’t for the life of you give you any reason why I couldn’t say, well, this is what’s coming up, or I’m having this old memory surface, or I just knew that I was being taken someplace by an intelligence greater than me. And what the grief wanted was to broaden out and deepen. And this was happening prior to my extension out into the world more and holding more of the grief that I was working with. So I needed that bottom broadened that I could hold more and be with it with less distress and less overwhelm. Yeah.
TS: You talk about how when we’re in the underworld, there’s a cooking of the soul, and you’ve talked about this metaphor of the warmth that’s required. And I think the patience, this is a really slow cooker, slow cooker meal here that’s going on. And I wonder what you can say to someone who’s in an underworld experience and has lost faith that they are ever going to surface again.
FW: That’s often the consequence of trying to endure that space rather than engage that space. And again, because we’re not taught how to engage it, we just feel like we have to endure this. So when I was in that deep space, I was writing every day. I was reaching out to friends. Sometimes people would come over and we would just sit in silence. They would just hold me and I’d cry. But the primary thing is to stay engaged with that material, ask it what it wants. What does it need from me? We typically have a framework that says, what can I get from this or what do I want? But there’s a certain hospitality that the adult has to show towards the grief that says, what do you need from me? It’s shifting the locus of subjectivity to the grief itself, to that underworld territory itself. What’s being asked of me here? Hillman would often say, we typically try to colonize what’s happening in the psyche. What can I extract from it? What can I get from it? And what I think is asking us of us here in the apprenticeship is how do I serve this? How do I mature it? How do I ripen it? How do I engage it in more of a participatory way rather than just how do I get by? And believe me, I understand the desire to get by. It’s hard. Hard.
TS: Yeah. Just to say a little bit more about being in an underworld experience and talking from a recent long passage, two and a half year passage that I’ve been through, part of it was this assemblage. And so I’m engaging with what’s really a letting go of an old constructed self, and there’s a whole lot of uncertainty. So it’s being with the unknown. So I’m engaging by being okay with not knowing what’s it all going to look like when I eventually, whoever knows when that is come out of this.
FW: Well, that’s a very precise description. In the long dark, we are going to be experiencing exactly that. Endings, decay, breakdowns, loss, disorientation, derangement. These are not comfortable states, but if we can recognize them psychically as necessary, and again, that’s the beauty of alchemy. As alchemy tells us this is necessary. When they talk about the negredo, the blackening, they’re talking about all those conditions as alchemical requirements for soul making. It’s as if we’ve lost our soul in this culture, and we’ve now are being asked to do this long descent and to watch and participate as things break down. Capitalism cannot sustain itself the way it does. Racism, systemic racism can’t sustain that. Economic disparities cannot sustain. These systems have to break down, but the process is difficult, but that’s where we are, your personal experience. But we’re also in a collective integrative. We’re in a collective time as a species of watching things go down.
And descent is not something we’re happy with. We’re an ascension culture, right? We like things rising up. Stock markets, the successes, achievements, erectile dysfunction. We got to cure that because we don’t want to go down. We don’t want to be taken into a territory that makes us vulnerable, that makes us uncomfortable, that takes us into the unknown. There’s this wonderful phrase, I don’t know if you’ve heard the one called Qarrtsiluni. It’s an Inuit term, Q-A-R-R-T-S-I-L-U-N-I, Qarrtsiluni. Qarrtsiluni means sitting quietly together in the dark, waiting expectantly for something to arise or to appear. And this is the whalers. The ones who go up whale hunting. They can’t go whale hunting until they get a song from the whale people. And so they have to sit quietly together in the dark. I think that’s where we are metaphorically. We’re not going to figure our way through the long dark.
We’ve got all the data we need to understand the problem, but that’s not the problem. There’s something more that we have to come into touch with, come into contact with. So we need to be able to sit quietly together and be patient and listen, what is it that’s trying to emerge? What is the new song that might allow us to actually approach living culture? Again, we don’t have a living culture. We have a conglomerate society, but we don’t have living culture. And that’s what I like about this work is it helps to reanimate living culture, ritual song, a shared meals, dance, dream, beauty. It’s all there. And those are the constituent elements of living culture. And we don’t see that very often
TS: Here in the long dark. If it’s not just about enduring this state of sitting in the unknown. There’s some other form of active engagement. You are introduced when I first described you in three words, psychotherapist, writer, soul activist. What does it mean to be a soul activist in the midst of the long dark?
FW: There are certain constituent elements of soulful living. Imagination is core. Ritual is central. Beauty is central. The poetic mind is central. So to be a soul activist means to use these traditions, these ways of being, to engage the material that we’re working with, like bringing imagination. That’s what Qarrtsiluni is. You’re sitting there in an imaginal field waiting for the whale dream to speak to you. That’s amazing. What if we got that slow and that still and that receptive to the dreaming earth right now, and that we were being informed by the earth what rituals we need to become human again, to repair our relationships, to the watersheds, to the migratory pathways, to one another. That would be awesome. So to be a soul activist means to take those practices, those foundational pieces around village, mind belonging again, beauty, imagination. Those become the entry points into practicing that and extending that material into the culture.
TS: Francis, I just need to ask you more about this. I imagine some people kind of glaze over when you say something like village mind and the rituals that I’m supposed to do at this time. It’s like, what are you talking about? I live with my partner, maybe my partner and kids, maybe no kids, and I don’t have access to a group of us dancing outside at night. I’m not doing that.
FW: Well, ritual doesn’t have to be complicated. That ritual I mentioned earlier of just calling three or four friends, over lighting a candle, sharing a poem, and then telling your stories. That’s ritual. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, intense. It just has to activate some part of our psyche that says, we are now standing in different ground. Ritual activates or invites different behaviors. It says a certain set of structures have been taken off. It’s like we don’t typically all cry together at a grocery store. It’s not the best place to do it. But in this space over here that we’ve designed for that, the psyche recognizes that and can then do what’s necessary. So all we’re trying to do is hit that cord, that resonant cord that tells the psyche a different order of behavior is invited here or is allowed here. We can cry together sitting around this table, and we can hold one another.
We can offer support, which we typically don’t do on the street. We need spaces set aside for that. So it’s not elaborate. I think the word is it become so esoteric that we don’t even know what it means anymore. To drop into ritual, it means come into a shared intention. Why are we gathering here? Every ritual should have an intention. Our dear friend just died. We just had a memorial service two or three weeks ago for a young man in our community who died. He was founded dead in his house, 50 years old, the son of one of our village members. And so the village came together and created a ritual field for their family and their friends to all come together, and it was beautiful. And that’s what we need is to feel like we’re ritually covered.
Jeanette Armstrong, Okanagan Elder Imagine of Jeanette, she talks about it in her culture that for them it’s village first, family second, and the individual last. And when you have a framework like that, you are always covered. No matter what happens to you, you’re covered by the village. We’ve inverted that completely. So it’s individual first, family second, and we talk about community all the time, but it’s kind of empty. It’s thin. And so we often feel very exposed, very naked, to the difficulties of life. So my work has been to try to reanimate this even just for a short amount of time to signify to the psyche, the space, the doors open, the village is in place. I can go do the work I need to do. And the ones who come back over and over again to these gatherings, you can feel how much more fluid that they are and their being. And that wonderful line from Jaime, I believed I wanted to be a poet, but deep down, I just wanted to be a poem. That’s what I think we experience for a moment in those ritual spaces. I’m no longer a fixed thing. I’m a fluid verb. I’m a dance. I’m a poem. I’m a rhythm. That’s what it means to be alive again, I think.
TS: Just have one final question for you, Francis. You write about how in your own underworld journey at a certain point, the discovery and invocation of courage was important to you. And I wonder if you can say some things about the courage you found and that you think we need at this time during the long, dark,
FW: Beautiful, beautiful question. Yeah. I think the two things we need right now are courage and faith. Faith that there’s something intelligible about this time, something intentional about this time from the soul of the world that we’re being taken downward, not by some sense of failure, but by a sense of invitation. Something has to be found and courage to keep our hearts open. I mean the word courage, right? Co courage. Full heart from the French. So I think our work is to keep heartful, to keep our hearts open to the world. So we’re back to the apprenticeship. The very first question, how do I keep my heart open? I have to stay current with my sorrow, my sorrow, my ancestral sorrow, the world sorrow. I have to keep it moving. What do I need to keep it moving? Friendship, community, beauty, imagination, ritual. Those help us to keep it moving. So again, we get to be current, but also helping to imagine what a new culture might actually look like.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Francis Weller. He’s the author of the book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, and a forthcoming book, In the Absence of the Ordinary. We’ve been talking about our apprenticeship with sorrow, and I want to thank you, Francis, for the holding space. Your writing and your presence provides for us to go into that apprenticeship with you as a companion. What a powerful gift you are bringing to the world at this time. Thank you.
FW: Thank you, Tami. Pleasure to be here with you and share these thoughts, I think with a very hungry culture.
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