America has a grief problem.
More accurately, late-stage collapsing capitalism has a grief problem. That problem is, we’re taught to pretend like we don’t have it. If we do have it, if we are experiencing grief, it had better be from a handful of ‘acceptable’ causes—death of a family member or close friend, death of a beloved pet—it had better last only the acceptable amount of time—one to three bereavement days for a family member, you’re out of luck for everything else—and it had better not become anyone else’s problem. Grieving publicly where someone might see you? Depending on who you are, that someone might call the cops on you.
Anyone who’s experienced grief knows that it’s not tidy. You, reading this right now, know it’s not tidy. Grief is a jarring break with the way things were, an unmistakable proof that we cannot control our lives in the ways we’ve been conditioned to expect.
Maybe that’s why the powers that be work so hard to banish grief, deny its existence when and wherever possible and failing that, when grief inevitably oozes through the cracks of their vault, uncontainable as a key truth of its nature, they attempt to repackage it into something palpable, restrained, manageable.
We are not fooled.
When our hearts break open, experiencing loss, injustice, the thunderclap of shock that blackens the edges of our vision and muffles our hearing, the creak as the ship of our course is slowly torn asunder by the weight of witnessing, of realization…
We understand, intuitively, what our ancestors understood. Grief is the coinflip of love, with the power to power to drop us to our knees, to our stomachs, down to the land itself.
When we grieve, the illusions that drifted over us are pushed, pulled, wrenched aside, dissolved by heaving sobs and shredded by furious shrieks.
When we grieve, we create the expanse to dream, the space to invite into our lives the futures that could not even be seen beyond the illusions, nevermind conceived as possible.
When we grieve, when we acknowledge that which is no longer possible, we become aware of all that still is.
Grief, paradoxically, is a path to liberation. This is the foundation from which I serve.