I’ll be sharing a series of writing on the topic of grief, which has been heavy in my heart for both personal reasons and because I’ve chosen it as a topic for my monthly women’s ritual. I’ve also been rereading one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read on grief and rituals of transformation.
This book is so important to me. So much so, that if I was asked, what’s the ONE book you would recommend everyone in the world read? It would be this one. I feel it is that life changing and life giving.
The book is called The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller.
I have decided to lead a FREE virtual book club (via zoom) for this book, open to both men and women, and it will start in early 2024. If you’d like to join us, please reply to me directly or comment on this post. I will be gathering the list of interested people and sharing the details after the holidays.
There will also be an opportunity to work more deeply with me in a paid capacity, but I wanted this first level of diving into this topic together to be free and accessible to all.
I hope you’ll consider joining us — and maybe my upcoming writings, that will be dropping to you over the course of the next week or two, will inspire you to join.
For now, here is a quote from The Wild Edge of Sorrow about ritual (leading ritual is a main part of my job and purpose in this world, in case you didn’t yet know that about me).
"We are creatures of ritual.
We have been using rituals for tens of thousands of years.
Ancient burial sites include careful placement of artifacts with the dead, such as bones carved and covered with ochre, pieces of flint for the hunt in the next world, food, and ornamented beads.
In fact, grief over the loss of a loved one may have elicited our first ritual actions.
There is something about ritual that resonates deep in the bone.
It is a 'language older than words,' relying not so much on speech as on gestures, rhythms, movements, and emotion.
In this sense, ritual addresses something far more primal than language.
The urge to create rituals to help us hold the intensity of day-to-day living exists deep within our psychic structure.
For most of our history, rituals provided the means by which the community could address the need for healing and renew the people's relationship with the place where they lived.
Over generations, a call-and-response between the individual, the community, and the land evolved that centered on ritual as the primary technology for maintenance of the living world.
Today, in the absence of communal rituals that hold and sustain our psychic lives, we often unconsciously fall into ritualized behaviors.
These patterns, however, do not carry what is required to make them soul-nourishing practices.
In the end we will either participate in ritual deliberately, which binds us to soul, community, nature, and the sacred, or we will be reduced to repetitive patterns of addiction, compulsion, or routines lacking the artistry and renewal of genuine ritual."
- Francis Weller