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The Gifts of Grief
Oct. 28, 2005
by Starhawk
I woke up this morning thinking
about grief. It’s almost Halloween, the time of year when, we say,
the veil is thin between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Here
in San Francisco, we’re preparing for our big, public, Spiral Dance ritual
on Saturday night, busy getting all the last-minute details taken care of, dealing
with the complexities of a new location and a new form for the ritual. It’s
easy to get caught up in the responsibilities and the practicalities…but
this morning, in that twilight space between waking and sleeping, I found myself
thinking of the dead.
There are so many dead this year. So many large scale tragedies. The
great wave last winter that swept tens of thousands to their death in Asia. The
hurricanes and floods in the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean. The earthquake
in Pakistan, the mudslides in Guatemala, the simmering volcanoes in El Salvador.
Natural disasters—compounded by official neglect, intensified by global
warming and the destruction of wetlands and mangrove swamps and all of nature’s
protective systems.
And the dead of war. Two thousand American soldiers, tens of thousands of Iraquis.
A constant attrition of Palestinians and Israelis. The countless war
dead of Africa who have dropped out of the news. Each death a loss to someone,
a huge well of grief.
My mother, who died thirteen years ago, was an expert on loss and grief. A
psychotherapist, she wrote a book, “A Time to Grieve”, which is still
a classic in the field of bereavement. She taught me that grief is not something
to fear. If we let ourselves feel our pain and loss, if we truly mourn and
rage, grief has a healing, transformative power.
Cindy Sheehan, the mother of one of those dead soldiers, is taking her grief to
the gates of the White House, chaining herself to the fence like the suffragists
who demanded votes for women, long ago. I met her earlier this year, at
Crawford, Texas, where she encamped before Bush’s ranch demanding to meet
him face to face, to confront him with the reality of her loss, to ask him what
was the noble cause her son died for. Her vigil there was like the small waves
of the sea, eating away at the buttresses of his power, a harbinger of the storm
surge to come.
If compassion is the ability to feel and imagine someone else’s grief, Bush
and his cabal of ultra-right advisors have long seemed lacking. Moreover,
they have fed on death, used death and fear and horror to buttress their power.
They used the deaths of September 11 to extend their power. They used
fear and ruthlessness to stun their opposition into silence and complicity as
they unleashed a brutal and criminal war. Like vampires, they have maintained
their unnatural life with blood.
But the counter to this ghoulish power is real grief, real loss. True grief
has the power to open the heart. It strips away lies, dissolves false differences,
and reminds us that we are all vulnerable, all mortal, all clinging for our lives
to those fragile cords of love that bind us to those we care about. True
grief casts out fear.
“There’s nothing they can do to me,” Cindy Sheehan said to me
at Camp Casey. “There’s nothing more than can take from me.
I’ve already lost my son.”
Standing among the pictures of the dead, at Camp Casey, I imagined the spirits
of those soldiers rising up, a tidal wave of rage and anguish turning against
those who caused and misuse their deaths. I see Cindy, fearless in her grief,
strong in her mother-right, bringing that spectral army to the gates of the White
House itself. I see them enter in, cleansing, rooting out lies, overturning
every false foundation. I feel a fresh wind blowing, awakening courage,
integrity, and compassion in all of our hearts.
This is the spell I would shape this Samhain season. We are in a time of
great loss, facing more before the world comes back into balance. The gifts
of grief are painful, but if we open to them, allow our hearts to break and in
breaking, expand, then grief and compassion may save our lives.
If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and want to join our Spiral Dance ritual
it’s on Saturday, October 29, 2005 at Kezar Pavilion (note new location!).
755 Stanyan Street, San Francisco 94117 (north-east corner of Golden Gate Park,
off the MUNI N line). Doors open at 6 pm, ritual at 7:30 pm. For more information
see the Reclaiming web site at www.reclaiming.org/rituals/samhain.html
Starhawk’s mother’s book is:
A Time to Grieve: Loss as a Universal Human Experience, by Dr. Bertha
Simos, NY, Family Service Association of America.
Copyright © 2005 Starhawk. Feel free to repost or reprint this for nonprofit uses,
all other rights reserved.
Starhawk is the author of ten books on earth-based spirituality and activism,
including The Earth Path, The Spiral Dance, and together with M. Macha Nightmare,
The Pagan Book of Living and Dying. She teaches and creates ritual with
the Reclaiming network that links earth-based spirituality and activism. www.reclaiming.org
, offers Earth Activist Trainings in permaculture design, www.earthactivisttraining.org
and organizing and action trainings with the Root Activist Network of Trainers,
www.rantcollective.net .
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