There is an Art to Grieving

A Meditation on the Deep Initiation of Grief

Kintsugi means “golden joinery”

The Japanese art of Kintsugi, meaning “golden joinery”, allows what is broken to wear the acknowledgement of the beauty of its own imperfection and impermanence.

We are absolutely going through mass waves of awakening as a society, right now. Many of us are being ‘called to service’ through our own sacred forms of becoming, which by necessity always involve radical forms of unravelling and dissolution.

This is all deeply necessary. We have to endure a necessary threshing so that we can greet the future standing naked of our past. We have to step through these critical threshold moments necessarily alone. We are being called to face trials of maturity, being asked to acknowledge what promises and relationships cannot carry us forward, without the necessary guidance or perspective, and lacking the language to hold this sacred conversation with life and with our own becoming.

These pieces were created as a Medicine of Understanding.

Listen to yourself.

Your heart lies broken in the most profound of ways, you are utterly alone in all the world, in the enormity of your grief, and here you are saying to yourself, “I should be more grateful…”, or “I ought to” this, or “I probably should” that.

Do not come any closer. Take off your sandals. Don’t you know this is sacred ground you are walking on?”

Exodus 3:5

Your grief is holy ground—the sacred foundation where your past hopes lie half buried in the soil, from which the forest of your future loves may yet find root. The ruins of your relationship, the haunting echoes of the deep connection that can never die, and painfully, can only be touched through grief.

You must spill your water on that broken earth with your tears until they are spent. Your grief is the wellspring of those tears. Years from now, the wellspring will seep out of the earth and will flow again. And each time you must claw at the clay to clear a path for it. Each time you must drag at the tangle of weeds and overgrowth that cover the eye of it.

Each time you must taste its bitter medicine.

There is no right timing.

There is no right way to grieve. Your grief will teach you the right way and the folly of doing anything so silly as trying to hold the process to a calendar or a clock. And then ironically, we have to do precisely that. We have to give grief its proper season, in every season.

As the gentle teacher from the east once said, “To love without knowing how to love wounds the one we love—Love’s other name is care.”

We are never taught, exactly, how to face the facing of grief. So, let me tell you again of that ancient map of the heart we call The Seven Stages of Grief.

You first enter its domain through Surprise. This is the earthquake. The temple of your hopes that enshrined your love—shaken down to their foundations—crumbled and in ruin. Be not afraid. This is the beginning of it, and we all come by this way.

After that, we are each utterly alone in how we find our way and how we become lost. Some of what we encounter in that landscape you might leap over, or side-step, and you might double back and become ensnared by some of the stages more or less than I did. It is a personally tailored journey.

But you will know you are clear when you pass through the final gate. Its name is Acceptance.

Say what you want about joy and happiness, but real wisdom and understanding are always more easily shared and gifted to someone who is familiar with grief.

ON GRIEF

Grief
is a departure from a place
you had no desire to leave,
a place
you had thought was home.
 
The gradual reluctant acceptance
of a wound that will never fully heal,
 and a way in which the heart is broken
not with the sudden theft of loss,
but by the slow realisation
of all that was
now being taken away.

And a small flickering light of joy
that slowly withdrew
from your world
just as your light withdrew
from the world

and passed they—both together—
into the deep chest of sacred dreams;
A place that one could open
only by invoking the most wrenching pain
in wincing glimpses of the past. 
And a painful hollow space left in your present,
too heavy to hold for long
and far too precious to let fall.

Rocco Jarman, March 2019

There is an Art to Grieving.

You must make time for it and time-box it, and while you sit with it, you must do nothing other than that for that brief but unrushed time. The only mind you must pay is to your future capacity to love. What the ‘sitting with’ grief looks like, matters, enormously so. The better we get at the art of grieving, the more we grow and heal. And the more we grow and heal, the deeper we can inhabit our lives and the fuller our life can become.

To be whole, we must grieve. Every cycle, grieve something real. And if you have nothing real to grieve, grieve that you have nothing real to grieve, for it means simply that you have not lived.

Part of that art is knowing how to Grieve.

Grieve as much as you can bear. And then allow yourself to rest a moment, even from that. You have the rest of your life to grieve this. In fact, every moon, every season, every year on the anniversary of the earthquake that broke your heart, and took your promise from you—in all the special moments you find yourself wishing were happening under the sunshine and starlight of what was—you must make time to recall your grief.

You must learn the grace of setting a place for it at your table, even when it arrives unbidden. You will still learn that you do not want it to pass away and never return. That is the secret truth about love, it comes to teach us. For now, at last, you begin to understand that experiencing this much aching in your heart does not mean something is wrong. It means that you loved deeply. To learn how you love and what you love is to learn who you are.

Kahlil Gibran said, “Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses the understanding.”

THE BREAKING OF THE SHELL

Grief is the wrenching pinch and twist we feel, 
as the torque generated
between pain and necessity
itself.

We are never taught exactly how
to face the facing of grief,
much less truly face the grieving in another.

The lesson we discover
as soon as we are able,
is to Witness it and Honour it;
sit with it,
vulnerably
as you would a friend.

Embrace it,
silently,
as you would a child.

Face it, like a Father.
perhaps not like your father,
but the one you know you needed,
rather than the one you wanted.

Be fully present like a Mother,
gentle and full of grace.

Do not suffer your grief,
hold space for it, 
and set a place at your table, 
even if the season has been thankless
and your board already bare.

Hold space for the one
in you that grieves.
—it is like a Child
whose heart has been broken 
against the hard truth of the world,
and whose only refuge
is the romanticised memory
of the deep love that it belonged to
before the moment of discovery,
the clinging to of which
bears down with a crushing force of sorrow
and an unrequitable remorse
some way beyond the gentle measure
of the little cupped hand
of what its heart could hold.

Grief breaks our hearts open
so they can be made ready
both by and for,
a wider, deeper
form of love.

Rocco Jarman, January 2023

The deepest wound is where you loved the most vulnerably, without erecting defences. What is love if not this enormous courage?

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