Introducing Salt Trails: Let us carry our griefs together

“Grief has always been communal, always been shared and consequently has traditionally been regarded as a sacred process. Too often in modern times our grief becomes private, carrying an invisible mantle of shame forcing our sorrow underground, hidden from the eyes that would offer healing. We must restore the conversation we need to have concerning the place of grief in our lives.” ~ Francis Weller

Since May, a group of us — nine healers, grief and death workers, artists and ministers — have been engaged in this conversation.

Dreaming into being the communal space about which Weller writes. Visioning what might be possible for our healing, and the healing of our communities and our planet, when we carry our sorrows out from the shadows, move them from the underground into the light of each other’s tenderness, empathy and compassion.

In the last year and a half, we have all experienced profound loss, been pressed, whether we chose to acknowledge it or not, to the bare bones of grief.  The disruption of the lives we knew and the plans we held for them, the death of our loved ones, the traumas of state-sanctioned violence and political upheaval, the relentless crises of social inequity and climate change — all of it has taken a toll. Some of us are tending our wounds, sifting through the layers to do the brave, vulnerable work of healing. Others of us are trying to push past the ache, find our way to a life that bears some resemblance of what we once knew. Many of us may not realize the impact of what we’ve been through for years to come. 

 Yet, as West African elder Malidoma Patrice Somé says: “We have to grieve. It is a duty like any other duty in life…Grief is seen as food for the psyche. Just as the body needs food, the psyche needs grief to maintain its own healthy balance.”

For the Dagara people of Burkino Faso, where Somé  is from, grief is always a communal expression, validated by the presence of the village. Grief that is singularly, or privately, expressed, as it is in Western culture, is seen as incomplete — detrimental not only to the individual psyche but to the collective well-being of the community.

We are not meant to grieve alone. And yet that is what so many of us have been doing, not just in this last year of forced isolation and lost mourning rituals but as part of our cultural conditioning, where avoidance, distraction and “moving on” have become our primary coping mechanisms when it comes to facing the tumultuous, dark uprooting that comes to all of our lives.

We, this collective of nine, believe in another way. An ancient way that invites us to move grief through our bodies, calls us to witness each other’s sorrows, draws us from our aloneness into a place where we can be met and affirmed with our howling hearts, our brimming cup of tears.

Salt Trails: A Community Grief Experience was birthed with a thunder clap, as we gathered one stormy night to explore a shared response to the last 17 months of living through a pandemic as well as countless generations of carrying untended, unexpressed grief and loss.

 As a collective, we believe there are infinitely more possibilities for healing on shared, fertile ground than in the hard, barren landscape of isolation.

 We believe in the rich and enlivening intimacy of a community fed by our collective sorrows and joys.

We believe in the power of song, art, ritual, movement, storytelling, beauty and nature to help us embody and carry our grief.

We believe we all deserve to be seen and held in the beautiful wilds of our grief, that there is an alchemy that happens when the wounded in one of us touches the wounded in another.

We believe that to freely express our grief is also to praise our aliveness and everything that we love.

And we invite you to join us, to follow the Salt Trails, to a community grief processional to be held October 9 in Philadelphia, where we will carry our griefs together.  

 Before then, we have two smaller events planned, for August 20th and September 11th.

 Save the dates and follow us on Instagram and Facebook to be part of these FREE community offerings.