Apprentice to Grief
{A Poem}
Apprentice to Grief
A poem written before, during, and after a daylong grief ritual in the Dagara tribal tradition of Burkina Faso, in the lineage of Sonbufo Somé
Grief calls me, first softly.
Then a drumbeat so loud I feel my heart is on fire
And yet mistake her for rage.
When I was much younger
Seven years of age
The grief held me under water
Til I drowned.
Took a crucifixion of sorts
A rescuscitation
To bring me out of that,
37 years in the making.
This time it’s different.
The grief comes as fire,
As immolation
Not drowning.
I burn in grief.
I mistake it for rage–
But No, parts of it are rage–
But grief.
This time, she accumulates slow and I do not notice.
Until four, five, six events and my heart is on fire.
Passing through this cannot be done alone, I am told.
Did you know that the Empire forbade mourning?
Which empire?
Most of them.
That energy too powerful to be spent
On people bent to the drumbeat of
Recovering their sovereignty.
And so mourning was outlawed.
Look at how far we’ve come.
We’ve come nowhere.
Now the interdiction has been internalized.
We suppress the mourning in ourselves.
The Empire has no more need of doing it.
This is called internalized oppression.
We used to weep and gnash our
Teeth
Tear out our hair, beat our chests bloody.
But now we (the collective we, of whom I speak)
Drown in it, sink underwater
Into depression
Into diseases of despair,
Not even bothering to reach out to one another.
This will not get us anywhere except dead.
So what is the other way?
What is the way of reaching out in grief?
I am not familiar with this technology.
This form has not be taught me in this un-culture
Into which
I have been socialized.
And so I come today, with others,
To apprentice to grief.
Let grief be the teacher,
Not some facilitator,
But grief herself.
Grief–
Teach me to bear sorrow as a living wound
Teach me to wash it clean in the waters of reverence
Teach me to transmute it alchemically in the fires
Of prayer and valediction
To sing your song of which my heart has much need
And which has not been taught in my mother tongue,
Birthed from Empires of loss.
Can you do all that, please?
Let us venture forth and inward, we shall see.
***
It is November 12, after the second rain.
I have mulched the better part of the new garden.
What griefs do I carry these days, I wonder?
Of those known,
the leaving of a spiritual path,
Some turmoil in a marriage,
The daily wounds of difficulty,
Financial struggle and the rest,
Loss of intimacy under stress,
A falling away by choice from my family of origin.
Trials and tribulations of work,
The great difficulty it has been.
Betrayals from institutions I was told represented
The pinnacle of success.
People structured in systems of domination
And exploitation hovering round and seeking to extract.
The loss of a dear place, this one, as pen meets paper,
Strikes as fire in my chest,
And perhaps deeper yet the unknowing of what to do
About this rape of the land
Legal according to the letter of the law,
A rape in my comprehension of the Living Law.
And beneath or behind all of these the wetiko,
The cannibalizing force,
My chest is hot to name it,
Our civilization so-called itself.
These are those griefs carried close enough to the surface that I know them,
Held in the bubble of what I consider to be my individual sense of self,
And yet intuitively I sense these are fractal apparitions and intimations
Also of grievous collective losses.
Spiritual.
Companioning.
Familial.
Financial.
Institutional.
Capitalist.
Bio-spheric.
Civilizational.
Sing in me muse, and through the forked byways
Of your tongue
Let this polysyllabic rhyme be sung.
I bring objects for the altar of grief.
Some to burn ritually,
Some to place.
In the former category
My old uniform of spirituality,
Which I intend to alchemize in fire.
In the later The Odyssey of Homer.
Imprint of the western cannon.
Archetype of the hero’s journey,
Nostos, the longing for home
At the heart of this failed project
Of western civilization killing us all.
***
Dearly beloved,
Please forgive me the short notice.
I am traveling to Lagunitas
For a grief ceremony that my spirit
Calls me to.
It is required somehow to enable me to step
Into the moment that comes next
Carrying less weight.
Phone if needed.
Love you,
G.
***
What am I grieving?
The sudden village.
The lack of a permanent village.
Exile (self-imposed) from the village I thought I was a part of.
Come in fact to burn the uniform of my prior spirituality,
To alchemize back to its original soil
My Indigenous spirituality
That took up the mantle of a particular religion,
A particular walk,
A particular formation of ceremony, cosmology.
Yet not only that.
I am grieving the over-take and over-reach of whiteness.
I am grieving rape & pillage of land.
A family of origin I have no wish to talk to–
No wish to remain in dialogue with.
Betrayals by institutions
I have been trained to look up to but not only that.
I am grieving perhaps my socialization
To toxic desires,
Into conformity with deathways,
Into believing in progress,
Into believing time exists.
It changes everything to know I will
Read this aloud,
And so I am grieving sloppy ritual–
And yet, whatever–
I am grieving the rules,
The chastening bell.
***
My original beauty got so deformed
By the shitstorm of the irrelevant place where I grew up.
Fuck St. Louis.
Fuck Olivette, Ladue, Clayton.
Fuck the midwest bourgeois suburban flightless boring shitbirds of my youth.
Fuck the close-minded bigoted traumatized incestuous victimizing socialization
Into whiteness of my family of origin.
The atheism of the monster philanderer patriarch perched above my youth.
Fuck my family of origin,
Their petty misbehaviors,
The monstrosity of my grandfather
The passive vacuum of my grandmother’s evacuated self
Fuck my peace-maker mother
My personality disordered father
Fuck the smallness of mentality
Fuck the smallness of those shitty suburban strident lives.
Fuck all of that.
Do I sound angry?
You stole away the beauty of my childhood–
for what?
For some notion of family a fantasy never really there.
You moved back there, fearful, fell under the mantle of protection
Of the grandfather, a monster,
A judgmental patriarch, failed and falling inward,
Philanderer,
Playboy,
Out of control in your boundary violation.
Fuck you.
Fuck my parents in their weakness,
Their smallness,
Their victimization
Their inability to read social cues, class.
Their inability to keep us safe.
Fuck you.
Fuck you to the smallness of mind that is St. Louis.
Fuck you.
Do I sound angry?
I grieve the time I wasted there.
I grieve the ugliness of that place.
I grieve waking up in the second story room of my youth,
Pallid light.
Imprisoned by that place,
And the suffocation that being there was.
Let it be.
But fuck you first.
Perhaps all this will change after the doorways of compassion open.
But first–NO.
Fuck you all.
***
Escape velocity at age 18.
Roped back in at age 19.
Escape again at 23 for good.
I look back now, from here,
Hands planted in earth,
Trees all around me,
Down a dirt road in the mind that is the recovery
Of my childhood beauty
At the mess of that madness.
What a loss.
Outside the window here there are towering Douglas fir trees.
The light is good and strong even in November.
Fuck you, I spit that history out of my mouth,
The residue of a time I could not find myself.
Here there are palm trees and the variegated thrush of the mind.
What is this grief?
***
Am I good?
Has the storm passed?
The sky is blue enough.
Rage passing through and then…
The silence in its aftermath.
No bones broken or plates shattered,
Just words poured out on a page
In the quiet of the mind.
Here we are in a grief ritual.
The morning is passed, we have come together in circle.
Into the technology of another culture that knew how to contend with loss.
I grieve.
I grieve.
I grieve.
The simple act of allowing it to exist, all we have suffered.
Exists anyway, whether we allow it or not.
But–ah, just this, just allowing it.
The body understands even if the mind does not.
This rest,
This repose.
This relenting of the contraction of defense.
A descent.
Dante knew something of this, did he not?
Nel mezzo del camin de nostra vita
me ritrovai em uma selva obscura
che la diritta via era smarrita.
But I am not lost.
Breathe down into all this tightness,
The lamplight heart
The heaviness of it all.
The burn of fire.
I sit with my back against the hearth,
The right side of my face warmed by flame.
Outside a stellar’s jay calls,
The wind is chilly but we’re alright in here.
***
What am I alchemizing?
Religious clothes that don’t fit anymore…
But then it takes me awhile.
I wander, until, YES
Being pinioned by struggle.
Heartrate picks up, that is closer to some truth.
Some small spherical hard stone.
Fake rocks.
Poverty.
That tightening fear.
I am alchemizing poverty.
And the mindset of poverty.
Of not enough.
Of sometime in the future.
Of not yet.
Of not now.
Fuck all of that.
I am alchemizing getting screwed.
Fuck Stanford, fuck all of that.
I am re-writing the mystery code of my own becoming.
I am grieving religions that do not fit,
That cause one to give up parts of one’s sovereignty.
Of struggling, and letting that be in the rearview.
Of poverty, of not enough, of not being there yet.
This is enough, this moment, here, now.
Of getting screwed.
I am alchemizing getting screwed.
The inter-generational trauma of getting screwed.
Because of being Jewish, or being traumatized, of having lost ones parents, or being afraid, or whatever else stands in the way of sovereignty.
I call on the mystery to transmute–
I don’t know how–
These griefs into whatever is through them.
Whatever learning needs to come through them.
Whatever needs to be set down, left here, on this land, which is not my own.
Whatever needs to be burned to ash.
Burned to phoenix.
Burned to dematerialize.
Part of a uniform.
A stray autumn leaf.
A fake rock.
A mushroom.
A screw.
Strange alchemy of fire.
Mysterious guardian of becoming,
In my chest already, work your becoming
On my bundle.
Let’s have a ceremony.
Soon
soon.
***
Ah, grief.
Your gift is the deeper arc of my own yearning to be free.
Is the shape of the shake of the rattle.
The sound of the drum.
The remembrance of the body’s ability to shake off what is not needed.
Beneath the hollow of the hollowed out chest,
In the hollow of the collar bone
The deep seat of the sits bones,
The gift of grief is the shape of life–
That suffering the deep counterpart of love.
Love lost.
Love suffocated.
Love turned in on itself,
Given no place to turn.
I will set you free, if I can.
I will give you back to the altar,
Set you before the ancestors,
In a sacred way,
Not disclaiming you,
But letting go the suffering of your stagnation.
Grant you a place of honor,
If I can,
Acknowlege your knowing,
For here I am,
In this ritual from another people,
Another tribe
That my body somehow knows how to do.
And for this I am grateful,
Though grieving,
For these five doors of grief.
The grief of transience, all things changing,
Of the seasons, of time, of age, impermanences.
The grief of love not touched.
The parts inside me where love had not entered,
Forgiveness had not worked its way in.
The grief of ancestry.
This one I’m still working with,
Whose ancestors are mine,
Ancestors of spirit or blood,
I question yet.
The grief of mystery.
The grief of the world.
The grief of existence.
Counterpoint to love.
I can see how rage is the stepping stone before your door.
I don’t know what has happened in this ritual.
And perhaps that is part of its intelligence.
Yet whole, I feel somehow,
Through the tears falling steady as autumn rain.
-November 12, 2022
Related Practices:
See Allow Yourself to Grieve. See Grief Tending. See Descent. See Fanning the Fires of Community. Emotional Yoga, Feel Your Feelings, Practice Quieting the Mind, Self-Compassion, Working with Betrayal and Other Experiences we Don't Want to FeelPhotography: | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.