Community Grief Ritual

We gather together at the common well of grief to tend our hearts, sing our tears, be with whatever your particular experience is at this time – whether grief, shame, rage, numbness, fear, joy, resistance – and witness, accompany and have each others back, when, as Martin Prechtel says, …the grief may be so strong, we fear we might drown and we need to know someone is there to pull us out of the water.

These are times marked with grief. So much loss and sorrow in the personal and collective areas of our lives. We are not in this alone. Grief is a given in this life, a natural part of the human experience, meant to be shared with others, not in isolation, and with a ritual container big enough to hold the magnitude of our losses.

Grief is intimately connected to our love and can deepen us if we allow it. Tending to and metabolizing our grief often transforms into gifts of beauty, action and care for our world. It softens our hearts and opens us to our humanity with more capacity to respond to those around us with compassion and wisdom.

This ritual is inspired by the Dagara people of West Africa, and we would not be doing this work without being impacted by the work of Sobonfu Some and Malidome Some. We also recognize the Chumash people, on whose land we gather and all of our ancestral traditional rites and condolence ceremonies from around the world. Our team has had the great fortune to work with Sobonfu Some, Malidoma Some, and Francis Weller, as well as training in related work with Joanna Macy (Despair and Empowerment/The Work that Reconnects), Deena Metzger (Grief into Vision) and Martin Prechtel (Grief and Praise).