Thresholds of Grief & Joy
2022 has almost come to a close, and a new year is getting ready to greet us in just a few days.
I feel like we are all navigating a dizzyingly paradoxical emotional terrain - there’s relief, excitement, and joy at leaving behind some of the harsher aspects of the pandemic. There’s also fear, grief, and frustration at the collective pain we are all still processing, along with the uncertainty of what lays ahead.
Grief has been one of my greatest personal teachers lately, and I want to take a few moments to reflect on its lessons. Not because these lessons have somehow made any amount of grief easier to bear, but because the paradoxical gift of grief is joy, and my Siberian heart knows that joy is the most powerful nourishment for long winters.
First, it’s important to acknowledge that grief is an enormous inconvenience to the daily flow of modern life. Grief gives zero shits about goals, resolutions, or schedules. It drags us underwater when we least expect and floods our senses in moments of festivity and celebration when we swore we carefully delegated it to our Shadows to deal with, safely bottled up at the bottom of our psyches.
There’s a large stigma attached to being slow and melancholy in mainstream North American culture - unsurprising, given the obsession with efficiency and that the standard social greeting in the United States is a forced smile. Unacknowledged grief is the engine that feeds the tireless machine of social media, instant gratification, and so many of our other contemporary addictions.
And yet - there is a flow and movement to grief that carries enormous wisdom, especially for those of us passionate about innovation and reimagining our existing systems instead of re-creating them.
To build something beautiful that we may have never had or experienced before, whatever it may be - a safe home, an equitable society, an ethical business, a supportive community - one of the most important steps is to feel the grief of never having this precious, beautiful thing in the first place.
This part is really hard. It’s neither glamorous nor easy. Grief lives in the depths of our psyches, often wearing masks of shame, anger, and fear. Grief is the last resident of the Shadow kingdom tasked with protecting our most tender desires.
Yet once we are able to arrive to this depth - once we are able to hold the experience of grief with acceptance, magical things begin to happen. As our capacity to move through our grief expands, so does our capacity to receive joy that previously may have seemed not just unattainable, but completely unimaginable to our senses.
A desire borne from the depth of grief that has been honored, acknowledged, and absorbed into our conscious mind is what returns us to our own center of gravity. It is what allows us to lay down unshakeable foundations and learn how to discern the pain of growth from the pain of punishment; the taste of nourishment from the taste of poison.
Desire alchemized from grief gives us something infinitely more powerful than a series of goals or resolutions: it gives us a map towards our joy, drawn in honest collaboration with our own hearts.
So, as you prepare to greet the New Year ahead, I invite you to find a few quiet moments and ask yourself:
How did I show my grief kindness this past year?
What may my grief need in the coming year?
What desires are so tender, that they have settled to the soft sandy bottom of my inner oceans?
And - because our subterranean kingdoms are all ultimately connected - I invite you to share and celebrate these insights with one other trusted human being in your life. The wisdom to face our grief and to share our truths are some of the greatest gifts we can exchange with each other, and certainly worthy of celebration.
I suspect what happens in this threshold of grief and joy may surprise you.
*image is “Forest Portal” by Ron Germundson