Transformative Arts In Grief
There came a time when my intuition, my dreams, and the subtle voices of helping spirits, all told me it was time to let go of grief...
There came a time when my intuition, my dreams, and the subtle voices of helping spirits, all told me it was time to let go of grief. I wanted to honor my grief, really receive all it had to offer so badly, I was clutching at it like some kind of a rag doll for comfort and protection. I suppose I had gotten used to grief as a companion in my late wife's absence.
This poem was part of surrendering grief itself.
Broken Parts
When it was finally time
to lay grief aside
I found I was suspicious
of a life without it.
Who will carry the weight
this world offers each one of us?
Who will sing the imperfect songs
of the living?
Now I trust only those who carry
the broken parts
of the sun and moon
wherever they go.
When we reach the end of a cycle of grieving, and there may be many cycles of grieving just one loss, where do we arrive? How have we changed? I have felt a profound fullness, like a well deep within me has filled itself with a mysterious potential.
For those of us living in cultures that have not integrated the transformative potency of grief, there are almost no maps for understanding the journey we’re on or the many places we might arrive. It’s generally accepted that deep grief involves an existential crisis, but that's really as far as we seem to go. Ironically, in cultures where grief travels with people throughout life and is animated by ritual and mythic stories, there is no need for a fracturing of self and the kind of grand disorientation many people describe when talking about major losses in our culture.
The first trail marker of grief we’ve claimed in the West, the existential crisis, seems to have been dealt with by older cultures eons ago.
Yet here we are, struggling with who we are now that we no longer have our spouse, our child, a dear friend, or perhaps a parent. We are left to struggle with the broken parts, and maybe even acknowledge that some of them don’t need to be mended in order for us to have a life that feels whole and fulfilling.
We have tools.
For those steeped in the arts, be they written, visual or performance, we are not without tools on this journey. Each craft we’ve dipped our toes in becomes a survival kit. Each art contains tools of self-transformation that ultimately know no limits, because each art has its root in ritual.
Storytelling, incantation through poetry, costuming, music, performance are the meat and bones of any good ritual. The transformative power of the arts is ultimately the transformative power of ritual to reach deep within us, conjure our souls and empower them to heal us and carry us forth in life. For many of us, simply creating a ritual has few pathways of acknowledgment or support in our communities. The Arts, though somewhat downtrodden in the West these days, still have pathways in our communities.
Poetry comes most naturally to me, it embraces the mythic, metaphor based language of the soul, shaping a conjuring that might allow us to transform the energies within. This next poem was part of my conjuring myself back to the land of the living, changed, with new responsibilities, but whole again.
New Child-Elder
Grief made me forget
I was part of the sky.
Held down,
rocks placed on my chest
my wings pressed into the dirt
for a season
or two.
Now I rise,
my head tipped back,
remembering,
letting my soul billow up
into the endless everything.
The stars welcome
a new child-elder.
In “New Child Elder” I ritualized my return to the living, coming home in the darkness and being witnessed in my new form, that of a person who is just arriving in elder-hood. There is, of course, more going on in the poem than those simple steps. Like any good metaphor, like any good myth, like any good ritual, it is making many different kinds of magic, touching us in many different ways. But it is a story of return.
Elders don’t just exist to experience their own wisdom, they’re here to share what they’ve gained from their journey to date. Like a drum hide being stretched across a frame, with new strands woven into each other, we are being prepared to resonate for our communities and the world, not just ourselves.
I first started engaging these tools in ritual performance work I did for my graduate work many years ago, as my Uncle Jude slowly died of AIDS. I was one of his caregivers, and I found myself overwhelmed by the silence in my culture, not only over the many deaths of Gay men from AIDS, but in the face of grief itself. I wrapped myself in torn, black and grey fabric, covered from head to toe, invisible, while an audio recording of a poem I wrote rang out into the audience.
I was made mute, our culture was mute, but art gave me a way to overcome the deafening silence.
Each gesture I’ve made through the arts and ritual still resonates through my being, still informs the elder I am slowly growing into. More and more I feel my works impact on the world. It becomes more obvious over time how personal transformation creates real change, real healing in the world.
This is the last in a series of four pieces on writing and grief. All are linked below:
Cairnes - on how writing gives us inner landmarks that help us to navigate our grief.
Holy Offerings - on how writing is an offering to those who have passed on.
Keening Write - on how writing can touch that inner place of keening for the dead.
Transformative Arts - on how the arts heal us, bringing us back to the world after our grief journey.