What is the (and your) first grief💧🌊?
At the Wissahickon
I remember this past May. The month of the Mother. I kept thinking of this sentiment from Martin Prechtel's book The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief & Praise (a treasured companion for working with grief) I've never forgotten:
The heaviest of losses comes to all of us when we as babies in the womb lose our mother’s heartbeat when we are born. The loss of our mother’s heartbeat and the loss of the hungerless life in the womb are so traumatic and gigantic an event in every child’s immediate beginnings as to cause all of us as newborns to utilize the very first inhalation of our lungs to cry out in grief…All of us were born masters of that hopeful, life-giving sound of grief the day we rolled in, the sound that all humans somewhere know instinctually for grief. It is a newborn baby’s grief wail that is the most profound form of praise for being alive
Makes my tear ducts open every time I read it. Our first loss (or maybe not, depending on what our mothers experienced or lost prenatally) . Our first loss that many of us are not aware of, have not acknowledged, or grieved.
That communion we had with our mother in her womb. No matter what kind of relationship we had/have with our mother, each one of us was an underwater being at one time deeply connected to the source of life. And the body remembers everything.
The body also remembers a time when our ancestors were deeply connected to our original Mother, the Earth. Another loss many of us are not aware of, have not acknowledged or grieved.
In June 2020 sensational Philly filmmaker Nora Mullen asked me if I could be a voice for Mother Earth. She had to do a short film around the theme of Motherhood and she was thinking outside the box. She wanted it to be from the perspective of Mother Earth.
Nora filmed it on the creek I grew up playing on in a spot almost directly below the house I've been living in the past 5 years and you can view this beautiful work of art by clicking on the image at the top of this email. First time I'm sharing it with my mailing list!
This film holds both grief for the loss our connection with Mother Earth and praise for all She gives us. And it's a prayer for our homecoming, for our reconnection with her.
I speak to this grief around the loss of our connection to Mother Earth in another video I'm sharing with my mailing list for the first time!
In Spring 2020 I was quite honored (and really nervous!) when Michelle Cassandra Johnson asked if she could interview me as part of her Healing in Community: Grief & Covid-19 series.
The interview debuted in May 2020 and you can listen to it and other interviews here or below. I remember a friend sharing last year that she went back to the Healing in Community interviews months after they came out when her heart was feeling heavy. She said that listening to them helped soothe her breaking heart.
I know there are many heavy and breaking hearts from not just the past year and half but from generations upon generations of compounded unprocessed grief and loss. I hope these interviews serve as a resource for you.
But also know that we were never meant to grieve alone. Up until very recently in the history of humanity we always grieved in community. Healing happens together.
So at the bottom of this email I announce a new collective creation I've been helping to push out into the world with eight others. Opportunities for those in the Philly area to not carry their grief alone: Salt Trails: A Community Grief Experience. Stay tuned for more details and I'll tell you the story of how it came to be next time!
Sharing these two videos feels like perfect timing with Cancer season having ended last week. Cancer is a water sign, is the archetype of the Mother and associated with the great womb that is the Ocean, where all life began.
"We all come from the Mother. And to her we shall return. Like a drop of rain flowing to the Ocean" is the song that was playing in my head when I awoke this morning.
May we return to the Mother, by way of our broken hearts, carrying our grief together, feeding it to the Earth, and asking her to help us transmute it into grace and gratitude. Into beauty. Into a new world.
With wild heart,
Meghan