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We have forgotten that all our troubles are intertwined. Instead of letting them compost into the fertile soil of creative renewal, we often remain frozen beneath their weight — shedding tears behind closed doors, or damming them up as we dam the rivers. We also suppress the generative fires of our vitality that could sustain us.

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Letting go is the first motion of creation. It is rarely comfortable. Just as plants release their fruits in the fall — the flesh softening and rotting away so the seed can break free and begin their creative cycle— we, too, must allow ourselves to let go, before the next creative form can emerge.​

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What is Grief?

Grief touches all of our lives. Many of us have lost someone we loved, faced loneliness, felt the weight of ancestral burdens, or struggled with the harsh realities of the world. Grief can take many forms — sorrow, anger, shame, fear.

In our culture, the expression of grief has been exiled. We are often left alone with it, and in banishing grief, we also banish its innate intelligence — its ability to guide us toward healing. As Martin Prechtel writes, “Grief is praise, because it is the natural way that love honors what it misses.”

Love and grief are two sides of the same coin. In regaining our ability to grieve, we also regain our capacity to live and love fully.

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Why Gather in Ritual?

When we have the courage to bring our troubles forward and truly feel through them, we open a doorway for healing — for ourselves, our relationships, our ancestors, and the earth. What grief we share, we can bare. Ritual space moves energy in ways that can ripple across many levels of life. There is a collective intelligence that emerges when we come together with sincerity and care.

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“Even the simplest of rituals is a way of acknowledging the unseen, the unspoken-about, the holy, which feeds our lives with its inexhaustible generosity. Ritual restores us to one another and to that grander coherence to which we all belong. Devoting your time to a ritual is like tending to a living bridge between the seen and the unseen, keeping that reciprocity alive.”

— Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

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Ritual is a bridge between the visible and invisible worlds — a place where the individual and the collective meet, where the ordinary is given back its sacredness.​

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Grief Towards Creative Reunion

Every ritual we run is emergent, meaning we don't follow a rigid structure but create a container similar to how one might create art, according to the energy arising and moving. This ritual will have an over arching theme of leaning into grief as a path towards our creativity.

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We will turn our hearts towards our voices, our full feeling, our unhindered creative expression - parts of us that we may have exiled, and that are still watching from the edges in deep grief of their suppression. Throughout the ritual there will be guided space to open to the creative mysterious forces, to dream with earth, and to follow your impulses towards expression.

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We will make room for the creative tensions between polarities: the feminine and masculine, the logical and the beautiful, decaying and birthing, right and left, modernity and our indigenous souls. Without a space for tensions to surface, the grief at their core cannot unfold — which is preliminary for peace, or reunion to take root, and for the wisdom of these tensions to carry our lives forward. This ritual will offer space for these tensions to be expressed and honored, though any grief you carry will be welcome.

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​This weekend will be an opportunity for personal and collective transformation through leaning into grief and creativity, as well as an opportunity for training in grief literacy, collective healing, expressive arts and ritual. Above all it will be a creation of beauty - a feast for the living world, the unseen (including the ancestors and the future ones), and the holiness of life.

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