Yes, Peggy, this is very much the desperate circle so many of us in the US (is there any US in US?) are pacing around. Whatever you do, with others, will help. We need to support each other.
Peggy-this is the first thing that came to my mind as well. But, the more I thought about it, I wondered if I really want to go “there”—I will, instead contemplate 13 Ways of looking at a tomato.
I’m curious to know why you think grief is tied to religious belief. I’m not religious but I have felt grief intensely. I’d suggest it’s sadness over the loss of what won’t be. I’m sure there’s a German or Welsh word for that 😊
i hear you... what i mean is that one's way of processing grief can be very much influenced by religious belief IMHO. my word choice was off. And what i mean is that when my aging parents die, i will feel immediate grief, but because i am Christian, there's a part of me that also feels, i will see and experience them again...that they are not forever lost.
I am taking a graduate course on grief, a first class before matriculating into my Career 2.0 as a counselor. I was surprised to find out it was an elective course, because specific courses on grief are not required to get one's license. Incredible, given the universality of the experience.
Perhaps I feel this way precisely because it's my first course in a topic I've long been a student of, but I can see myself -- four years from now -- specializing in grief work.
We had a terrific discussion early in the class -- is grief a disease? Most of us said no, that it looks more like a wound, from which some people heal more completely...but even that isn't quite right -- we are transformed by grief into a new mode of existence.
My counseling career has been primarily as a grief counselor. I agree with you-- grief is not a disease. It's much more like a wound. And some griefs are like an amputation. We are, as you say, transformed. Forever. Grief can also be a portal to growth and depth and living life with a heart broken wide open. There are at least 13 ways to look at grief. Welcome, Maeve, to this sacred work.
friend is a death doula and getting her masters in thanatology. there are so many approaches, thoughts, and tools out there... not to mention the work/study of how substances like psilocybin can help.
So true, I am a retired psychotherapist and its lovely to hear some one at the start looking forward to the work. I took it all very seriously when I learned the 5 stages of grief and while that has always been in my mind I never had a single client that had only 5 stages of grief.
You will do great. The training is only a little part of it all as its more about the work you do on yourself and the energy empathy and ethics you bring to the space.
You might be happy to know that we are taught many more models. Right now my two favorites are Worden’s Tasks of Grief and Stroebe and Schut’s Dual Process Model. Less rigid, focused on restoration as much as repair, and allow for oscillation.
I'm a huge fan of Francis Weller, having trained under his lineage, it's the place I return to and lean on again and again.
He invites us to look at grief as a faculty, something to be cultivated through a life long apprenticeship; Grief he says can be acknowledged, practiced, tended, shared. The Wild Edge of Sorrow has been pivotal for me and for the work I bring to our community.
I really like your thoughts on this…and the fact that it’s an offered course in the first place. I don’t think grief is talked about enough. The way I’ve heard of it is through this transitory lense of loss….then move on. 2 years ago I lost my closest family member and it altered me completely. I am not the same person. I hit a rock bottom that took me closer to hell than I’ve ever been and it was impossible to get myself out. Luckily this was the catalyst for me to seek professional help for an eating disorder, ocd, and ptsd. My grief was beyond my capacity to live at that point. So I’m grateful for the outcome that I am now living (1 year into recovery and I’m healthier and happier than I’ve ever been) but the idea of grief was once presented in a cutesy cartoon as a plant that loses one of its leaves and then grows something entirely new. this doesn’t do justice to profound loss. I personally feel like an uprooted plant. Propagated, perhaps. It’s not just losing a part of yourself and regrowing. It’s losing yourself entirely, being ripped from the soil; and finding yourself in a cup of water and hoping for the best. I had a bunch of propagated vines off a plant that I stuck into a glass of water months ago and forgot about. Funny enough, their roots are longer and sturdier in the water than they ever were in the soil. So I organized them a bit better, got them a south facing window and they are happy and healthy. I think this is the best outcome I can hope for in regard to grief, but it requires a fair amount of uprooting. A total undoing.
Ciara, just seeing your message. Undoing is a good word for it. I am glad that your crisis brought you to a healthier place.
For my final project for the class, I am curating a collection of poems related to grief as a resource for counselors, relating each to some stage or task of grief or emotion. Your comment reminds me of two poems — not necessarily directly about grief, but most certainly related to your plant metaphor.
Thank for these recommendations! I will enjoy these a lot. Also two authors I love. I love that your project uses poetry as a resource for counselors. I think that is a brilliant fusion in regard to treatment. Poetry can reveals so many truths that normal discourse can easily miss
This is delightful, Pádraig! I've not encountered "thirteen ways" before, though in recent years I've been exploring something Martin Shaw says: "Find something and really look at it. Open some hidden chamber of your heart to it and give it twelve secret names."
I found myself starting with sand martins, simply because of the delight they bring to me each summer as they fly over the river.
This feels like permission to keep pushing, to add a thirteenth secret name, to insist that there's always another way to see, another aspect you haven't yet discovered.
It also feels like an invitation to a communal response - to hear thirteen people all share their experience of the same thing.
I recently, un-nested from a home I love to a new home I’m not in love with. We still own them both since I’m not willing to let go of one and we need the second one to be near to family in need of weekly five year old daycare. 13 ways to think of home might pry me loose from this feeling. Thanks. I know, two homes can’t be that huge a crisis can it?
I'm the opposite at the moment having to make a move at the end of the summer and I do not know where my next home will be. I am trying to be ok with that. Don't feel any shame about your situation as its yours, so own it. I suppose you could be grieving your old home. Home is such a particular thing to us all. I'm definitely going to be writing about it as it has come up in other prose and poems I've written. I'm reading “ the Dream House” for the second time around and it makes me think of home, houses and safety. Its author is Carmen Maria Machado. Powerful read.
I always favored the approach laid out in "blessing of a skinned knee" -- raise good citizens. motherhood as privilege and responsibility... raise good humans -- that will contribute and improve world...can be in the smallest of ways. parents worry @ so much, but can keep it quite simple:
Time - I feel it’s always worth looking at time in as many ways as possible, lest it become a linear trap, fused with ‘progression’. It’s something I return to time and again (no pun intended!) in my own writing.
From one Scottish west-coast isle to another, here is a tiny piece I wrote on Eigg, years ago. I was sorry to miss you in St Andrews (my hometown!) the other week, and I do hope you are feeling better now, Padraig.
magnificent... we have parents on the Charles River here in Watertown Massachusetts and you have captured the magnificence of a moment of watching them near the dam so beautifully.
There are many reasons however simply put I did not want to continue being robbed of our one beautiful life and to live in a fog. Everything is now bright and alive.
🕊🕊 Given how much this occupies my being, I choose Peace to write about in thirteen ways...wish me brave & bold courage and creative strength to find my way in new ways....
Maybe it’s the season, but 13 ways of looking at Easter is the idea jumping out at me for its possibilities.
I love the choice of 13 as the number. It has that “baker’s dozen” feel of having something extra, outside our expectations of the more workable, manageable, containable dozen. And with all the 12s in the Bible, 13 carries its own wildness and suggestiveness in that context.
Thirteen ways of looking at Spring. As a season that fills me with dread, and everyone else it seems with joy, I know it can't always have been this way. I'm trying to notice the small things that are ok or good about it without denying the dread. Like, all plant life and therefore animal and fungal life too, obviously. Thirteen Ways Of Seeing Spring would be an exercise in curiousity, and I'm all for curiousity.
Regarding 13 ways, I'm gonna say love, but really 13 ways couldn't cut the infinite angles to the conversation, its expression and subjectivity. The value we put on it. Yet for all the 8 billion souls out there, perhaps there's a common sense we all have from our experiences of love. On the inside at least.
.
I posted the below for Equinox but interestingly it was called 'Form' in its first iteration.
.
'Spring Equinox'
the chevron of birds, like fighter pilots
fly this way, but I walk
that. protection from prevailing winds, in an assured, decided 'V'
masks a formlessness—
of the vitality inside
from bone bare branched perspective
the trees are dressing themselves
in drooping infancy— bursts from bud,
impending blows, unspoken
interweave from on high
to woken open palms, her stories sing—
tilting, curling. catching
equinox light
tales in braille, in veins— mirrored
to witness—
a breathing back to life
I’ve forgotten the woes of winter
the squalls have cleared the clouds have been swallowed by azure blue
I can think about Iona without thinking about the Waterboys. I was at there concert in Sligo Ireland 20 years ago and they had been on Iona writing songs from dreams. So creative
I live in Dublin, was in Sligo only recently. One of my favourite parts of the country! I love the thrumming and humming, the wafts of peace in this track.
Thanks so much. I listened to the Peace in Iona YouTube. Lovely. I'm going to Iona for my first (and probably only) visit in September. I will definitely look for Padraig's rookery as well.
I saw a photo of myself in my early 20s recently and the following lines came to me...
I'm not skinny like I was
when I thought that I was fat
Maybe I'll explore 13 ways of looking at my body. Maybe not.
13 ways of answering the question “What in the hell should I be doing in this moment of tyranny in the U.S?”
Yes, Peggy, this is very much the desperate circle so many of us in the US (is there any US in US?) are pacing around. Whatever you do, with others, will help. We need to support each other.
Same for us in Canada 🇨🇦
Let your "anger" be your kryptonite. Fight.
Peggy-this is the first thing that came to my mind as well. But, the more I thought about it, I wondered if I really want to go “there”—I will, instead contemplate 13 Ways of looking at a tomato.
I'd like thirteen ways at looking at grief.
All the ways we die a little every time someone we love dies.
or do we live...i don't know.
like we take them in b/c they are gone... so we live more with them inside of us...
i think grief is likely tied to religious belief.
I’m curious to know why you think grief is tied to religious belief. I’m not religious but I have felt grief intensely. I’d suggest it’s sadness over the loss of what won’t be. I’m sure there’s a German or Welsh word for that 😊
i hear you... what i mean is that one's way of processing grief can be very much influenced by religious belief IMHO. my word choice was off. And what i mean is that when my aging parents die, i will feel immediate grief, but because i am Christian, there's a part of me that also feels, i will see and experience them again...that they are not forever lost.
Beautiful
I am taking a graduate course on grief, a first class before matriculating into my Career 2.0 as a counselor. I was surprised to find out it was an elective course, because specific courses on grief are not required to get one's license. Incredible, given the universality of the experience.
Perhaps I feel this way precisely because it's my first course in a topic I've long been a student of, but I can see myself -- four years from now -- specializing in grief work.
We had a terrific discussion early in the class -- is grief a disease? Most of us said no, that it looks more like a wound, from which some people heal more completely...but even that isn't quite right -- we are transformed by grief into a new mode of existence.
My counseling career has been primarily as a grief counselor. I agree with you-- grief is not a disease. It's much more like a wound. And some griefs are like an amputation. We are, as you say, transformed. Forever. Grief can also be a portal to growth and depth and living life with a heart broken wide open. There are at least 13 ways to look at grief. Welcome, Maeve, to this sacred work.
friend is a death doula and getting her masters in thanatology. there are so many approaches, thoughts, and tools out there... not to mention the work/study of how substances like psilocybin can help.
Here is my finished project — poems for counselors and mourners. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gFCtMFvufxDOn00T6ChFyN-MEYP-Sk537RT2-ijmQXE/edit?usp=drivesdk
So true, I am a retired psychotherapist and its lovely to hear some one at the start looking forward to the work. I took it all very seriously when I learned the 5 stages of grief and while that has always been in my mind I never had a single client that had only 5 stages of grief.
You will do great. The training is only a little part of it all as its more about the work you do on yourself and the energy empathy and ethics you bring to the space.
You might be happy to know that we are taught many more models. Right now my two favorites are Worden’s Tasks of Grief and Stroebe and Schut’s Dual Process Model. Less rigid, focused on restoration as much as repair, and allow for oscillation.
I'm a huge fan of Francis Weller, having trained under his lineage, it's the place I return to and lean on again and again.
He invites us to look at grief as a faculty, something to be cultivated through a life long apprenticeship; Grief he says can be acknowledged, practiced, tended, shared. The Wild Edge of Sorrow has been pivotal for me and for the work I bring to our community.
oooh. are these comprehendable for regular folks?
I really like your thoughts on this…and the fact that it’s an offered course in the first place. I don’t think grief is talked about enough. The way I’ve heard of it is through this transitory lense of loss….then move on. 2 years ago I lost my closest family member and it altered me completely. I am not the same person. I hit a rock bottom that took me closer to hell than I’ve ever been and it was impossible to get myself out. Luckily this was the catalyst for me to seek professional help for an eating disorder, ocd, and ptsd. My grief was beyond my capacity to live at that point. So I’m grateful for the outcome that I am now living (1 year into recovery and I’m healthier and happier than I’ve ever been) but the idea of grief was once presented in a cutesy cartoon as a plant that loses one of its leaves and then grows something entirely new. this doesn’t do justice to profound loss. I personally feel like an uprooted plant. Propagated, perhaps. It’s not just losing a part of yourself and regrowing. It’s losing yourself entirely, being ripped from the soil; and finding yourself in a cup of water and hoping for the best. I had a bunch of propagated vines off a plant that I stuck into a glass of water months ago and forgot about. Funny enough, their roots are longer and sturdier in the water than they ever were in the soil. So I organized them a bit better, got them a south facing window and they are happy and healthy. I think this is the best outcome I can hope for in regard to grief, but it requires a fair amount of uprooting. A total undoing.
Ciara, just seeing your message. Undoing is a good word for it. I am glad that your crisis brought you to a healthier place.
For my final project for the class, I am curating a collection of poems related to grief as a resource for counselors, relating each to some stage or task of grief or emotion. Your comment reminds me of two poems — not necessarily directly about grief, but most certainly related to your plant metaphor.
Ada Limón’s Instructions on Not Giving Up: https://poets.org/poem/instructions-not-giving
and
Mary Oliver’s Hurricane: https://wordsfortheyear.com/2017/09/01/hurricane-by-mary-oliver/
Thank for these recommendations! I will enjoy these a lot. Also two authors I love. I love that your project uses poetry as a resource for counselors. I think that is a brilliant fusion in regard to treatment. Poetry can reveals so many truths that normal discourse can easily miss
Here’s the finished project:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gFCtMFvufxDOn00T6ChFyN-MEYP-Sk537RT2-ijmQXE/edit?usp=drivesdk
Grief is a very important human process!
The unwanted friend...
I bet that will spawn 13 more.
Very interesting. Still the work we do on yourself is the biggest learning we bring to the space. I will look them up.
So willing to explore this exercise with you Terri if you'd like to.
13 ways of looking at darkness- the more I look the more light and hope I find. Soft darkness, huh?
yes
Yes this would be interesting to write about
“Learning To Walk in The Dark” by Barbara Brown Taylor
I read An Alter in the World and especially valued the story of her beloved froggy friends early on in the book and this idea of getting lost.
Clark Strand also has a book called Waking Up to the Dark, maybe you already know it? I gleaned some things from this book.
Do not know that author or book and will shortly! Thanks
This is delightful, Pádraig! I've not encountered "thirteen ways" before, though in recent years I've been exploring something Martin Shaw says: "Find something and really look at it. Open some hidden chamber of your heart to it and give it twelve secret names."
I found myself starting with sand martins, simply because of the delight they bring to me each summer as they fly over the river.
This feels like permission to keep pushing, to add a thirteenth secret name, to insist that there's always another way to see, another aspect you haven't yet discovered.
It also feels like an invitation to a communal response - to hear thirteen people all share their experience of the same thing.
Value your share immensely Jez.
Receiving this invitation, I facilitate a grief group howgriefmoves.com.au and now I know our Grief Speaks exploration for June.
Also, isn't the word 'delight' almost onomatopoeic.
Thank you Emma.
And yes, it is!
I would like to write about 13 ways to look at home.
You might love Howard Mansfield's book, "Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter".
It is one of my favorite bookshelf books I return to quite often for inspiration.
Thanks for that book recommendation Barbara! I have read Mansfield but not that one. Just downloaded it on kindle.
I recently, un-nested from a home I love to a new home I’m not in love with. We still own them both since I’m not willing to let go of one and we need the second one to be near to family in need of weekly five year old daycare. 13 ways to think of home might pry me loose from this feeling. Thanks. I know, two homes can’t be that huge a crisis can it?
I'm the opposite at the moment having to make a move at the end of the summer and I do not know where my next home will be. I am trying to be ok with that. Don't feel any shame about your situation as its yours, so own it. I suppose you could be grieving your old home. Home is such a particular thing to us all. I'm definitely going to be writing about it as it has come up in other prose and poems I've written. I'm reading “ the Dream House” for the second time around and it makes me think of home, houses and safety. Its author is Carmen Maria Machado. Powerful read.
Thanks Mitzie, I’ll check the book recommendation out. Good luck on your end!
Oh Mitzie, your answer made my heart beat faster. I think that may be mine too. Yes, 13 ways to look at home.
13 ways of looking at Motherhood — the physiology, the psychology, the range and depth of emotions…….are thirteen enough ways?
Thirteen is not enough for motherhood, but it's a great start. Maybe 13 mothers each looking at motherhood 13 ways?
Could be a book!
I always favored the approach laid out in "blessing of a skinned knee" -- raise good citizens. motherhood as privilege and responsibility... raise good humans -- that will contribute and improve world...can be in the smallest of ways. parents worry @ so much, but can keep it quite simple:
- be able to support oneself
- don't get addicted to... you name the addiction
- find partner who raised you up and you raise up
- only have children by choice
- find some beauty in daily life
Time - I feel it’s always worth looking at time in as many ways as possible, lest it become a linear trap, fused with ‘progression’. It’s something I return to time and again (no pun intended!) in my own writing.
From one Scottish west-coast isle to another, here is a tiny piece I wrote on Eigg, years ago. I was sorry to miss you in St Andrews (my hometown!) the other week, and I do hope you are feeling better now, Padraig.
‘On Eigg’ by Larissa Reid, 2019
The grey herons shelter
linear
under a peat bank in winter.
Light illuminates
their blue-shaded forms;
hunch-backed, curve-necked,
spike-feathered dinosaurs
who fold time like a map
and fly through millennia
wide-eyed
to stand stock still in the age-old rain.
magnificent... we have parents on the Charles River here in Watertown Massachusetts and you have captured the magnificence of a moment of watching them near the dam so beautifully.
This is so kind of you. Thank you 🙏
13 ways of how I overcame my unhealthy relationship with alcohol
I will be interested in who/what overcame you to overcome it.
There are many reasons however simply put I did not want to continue being robbed of our one beautiful life and to live in a fog. Everything is now bright and alive.
Yahoo!
🕊🕊 Given how much this occupies my being, I choose Peace to write about in thirteen ways...wish me brave & bold courage and creative strength to find my way in new ways....
Maybe it’s the season, but 13 ways of looking at Easter is the idea jumping out at me for its possibilities.
I love the choice of 13 as the number. It has that “baker’s dozen” feel of having something extra, outside our expectations of the more workable, manageable, containable dozen. And with all the 12s in the Bible, 13 carries its own wildness and suggestiveness in that context.
Thirteen ways of looking at Spring. As a season that fills me with dread, and everyone else it seems with joy, I know it can't always have been this way. I'm trying to notice the small things that are ok or good about it without denying the dread. Like, all plant life and therefore animal and fungal life too, obviously. Thirteen Ways Of Seeing Spring would be an exercise in curiousity, and I'm all for curiousity.
I feel that way about summer . . . I like your approach to this being an exercise in curiosity.
13 ways of looking at a flood
13 ways of looking at salt
13 ways of looking at a threshold
13 ways of looking at a nettle
13 ways of looking at middle C
13 ways of looking at thunder
13 ways of looking at a ditch
13 ways of looking at an orchid
13 ways of looking at a lion’s claw
13 ways of looking at the letter Z
13 ways of looking at a fist
13 ways of looking at a buttercup
13 ways of looking at 13
So many possibilities but so hard to actually write the poem…..!
Oh, I love the idea of 13 ways of looking at a threshold.
I think you did write the poem, Estelle:)...
Um, you just have Estelle.
And liked by 13 as of this moment…
Interesting you should mention 'Iona' This track by The Waterboys got stuck in my head the other day. Sending it out for peace in our times.
.
https://youtu.be/xRbZ-7WLYlY?si=LWoyD7Kdcmx6xjWZ
.
Regarding 13 ways, I'm gonna say love, but really 13 ways couldn't cut the infinite angles to the conversation, its expression and subjectivity. The value we put on it. Yet for all the 8 billion souls out there, perhaps there's a common sense we all have from our experiences of love. On the inside at least.
.
I posted the below for Equinox but interestingly it was called 'Form' in its first iteration.
.
'Spring Equinox'
the chevron of birds, like fighter pilots
fly this way, but I walk
that. protection from prevailing winds, in an assured, decided 'V'
masks a formlessness—
of the vitality inside
from bone bare branched perspective
the trees are dressing themselves
in drooping infancy— bursts from bud,
impending blows, unspoken
interweave from on high
to woken open palms, her stories sing—
tilting, curling. catching
equinox light
tales in braille, in veins— mirrored
to witness—
a breathing back to life
I’ve forgotten the woes of winter
the squalls have cleared the clouds have been swallowed by azure blue
all is clear again, bright
on the tipping day of longed for light
I’ve walked to the edge of the world to meet you
Rumi’s field, right from wrong
meet me now— here
in the sky. Beyond
.
(Audio read & accompanying music on link below)
.
https://theseainme.substack.com/p/spring-equinox?r=46rss
I can think about Iona without thinking about the Waterboys. I was at there concert in Sligo Ireland 20 years ago and they had been on Iona writing songs from dreams. So creative
I live in Dublin, was in Sligo only recently. One of my favourite parts of the country! I love the thrumming and humming, the wafts of peace in this track.
Thanks so much. I listened to the Peace in Iona YouTube. Lovely. I'm going to Iona for my first (and probably only) visit in September. I will definitely look for Padraig's rookery as well.
That's lovely to hear you liked it. It was a happy coincidence that it was floating in my head so.
thank you for this beautiful tune!
13 ways to grow old(er). :)
13 waves of grief