Our time is a time of ongoing obliteration against anything wild, and almost every cultural practice that dares to defy the supremacy of this project of repression and domestication. We also carry the toxicity of inherited grief from the injuries and violence of the past. In turn, this toxicity gets acted out again in the current generation.

A world that hungers from the lack of knowledge and understanding about grief will seek to erase anything old—cultures, traditional knowledge, even Eldership itself. In the place of Eldership we are left with simply "olders," unvalued, uninitiated, unfit to lead culture, concentrated on the modern fantasy of the "forever young." It is an understandable damage, because there has been no visible way to deal with the grief of our times. We have lost initiation processes that could make olders into Elders, just as there has been a loss of initiations for young people.

An almost unrelenting grief. And it is dealt with, by and large, through distractions, or by ignoring it, or suppressing it. We don't have the old ritual ways of dealing with it, so it can end up being carried in people's bodies as a toxic monster. Positive thinking and spiritual bypassing are understandable in a place that has lost the traditions of dealing with grief. Yet many old cultures see grief as an essential guide for community. 

Dealing with grief is to both release toxicity and to join with a sense of purpose to reform injustice. There is a toxic part of grief which needs to get out and be expressed. There is another aspect of grief that gets picked up and carried as a wisdom of experience. The real knowledge about how to deal with grief is not to be found in psychology, but rather in the indigenous understanding of the cyclic nature of life and the reciprocity that necessitates that grief and praise are two sides of the same coin. Martín Prechtel's talk on the subject [above on this page] is the best introduction I've found on the topic. I highly recommend it, and in fact, request that you invest the time to listen to it if you are attending one of my events.

Nawal El Saadawi

Often people wonder if anger is part of a Grief Ritual work. And yes, it must be. The setting of a ritual context is to point the energy of the grief and anger away from people, where it can do damage, and instead let the powerful composting energies of the Elemental Forces take it and transform it. Some people even wonder if they are "too sad" or weeping, or angry to come to a grief ritual. This is the time to let your ancestors carry you in the old way back toward the caring heart of the village. Don't listen to the old hungry ghosts who might be inside saying that protection is found in isolation.

The grief work always depends upon some creating of the conditions  that allow for the truth to be told. Grief comes in many guises, and many forms. People wonder if personal grief can be shared, if ecological grief, or grief about the state of the world can be shared, if old grief can be shared, if new grief can be shared, if the grief of empathy can be shared and on and on. In the Dagara tribe, once a grief ritual is called, it is understood that all the various kinds of grief are welcome to be expressed, and seen as a blessing for the village. This is the old way of understanding that grief is properly meant to be a navigation guidance system for the human community.

In the act of proper grieving, both communities and people reconnect more strongly with what is still alive, and know the difference between a thing that should be let go and a thing that should be fought for. Grief is a community situation for that reason. There is a lot of work to be done.