Finding light, as the days grow darker
A best-of roundup of resources on loss, retreat, and rebirth
“Love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings — all in the same relationship.”
―Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
This week, I’ve been away and offline, participating in a truly unique retreat in California — one that is centered not on meeting a writing goal, or having hot stone massages every day, but on the equally difficult and joyful creative work of finding yourself after loss. The retreat ends tonight, with the Wave of Light, a ritual in the pregnancy and infant loss world meant to mark what has been lost, and toast to what remains.
It feels right that this opportunity to retreat and reflect falls during a part of the yearly cycle that the ancient Celts once called “Seed Fall Time.” When the days grow darker, and the veil between the world of the lost and the world of the living is thought to be its thinnest — that, to them, seemed like the proper time to begin a new year, a new cycle.
And, well — why not?
While I step away to contemplate what my own losses have taught me, and what seeds may be regrowing now in me, I thought I would offer the invitation for you to do the same.
Below, I share some of my earlier Initiation Writes essays from this year, on the topic of what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls “the life/death/life cycle.” May they be of benefit to you as the days grow darker, and we all draw closer together around the inside light.
“I’m realizing that a lot of our initiations are about loss. How what we lose or leave behind changes us. I’m glad we can figure out how to reclaim some of the pain as a sign of growth and strength.”
— Reporter Ashley Locke, in a May interview on complicated mother-grief
Starting again, imperfectly
In this first post, I spoke about how so many of my initiations have ended in ash. And yet — something always emerges from the ash. If you are currently in a season of ashes, I invite you to start here with me.
Learning the truth about grief from trees
In this post, I spoke about contemplating the way trees heal during their hardest seasons — through connecting to community. This is one reason why I think grief retreats, while they don’t always sound like pure fun, can be so important for our regrowth. We humans don’t do well in isolation, and being witnessed and fed by others is often an essential catalyst for healing.
Fed by my Mother Trees
In this post, I talk about the importance of feeding and being fed by one’s loved ones in grief, especially during times of disenfranchised or stigmatized loss. Pregnancy and infant loss is in this category; so is, divorce, or loss of a loved one to addiction or suicide. These losses are real and they need to be marked as such. Millennial mothers, I have learned, understand this better than many other groups of people; this is my love letter to them. It is also a love letter to the biologist Suzanne Simard, who coined the term “Mother Tree” for beings that behave just as mothers do, doling out nourishment generously to those in their orbit to help the entire ecosystem to thrive.
Embracing winter as a second skin
The influential writer
is well-known for her work on “wintering,” of letting ourselves rest in between the sets of life. This post was my own entry into that conversation, writing into the contradictions and the difficulties of resting during our life/death/life cycles, in a country that doesn’t honor the natural rhythms of grief.Finding salvation in seed-starting
In this post, I wrote about how seed-starting has, for me, become a way for me to take my place in the life/death/life cycle. To take the ashes, and make something of it. As I wrote:
“There needs to be a physical ritual to mark where a person's life-fire has become ashes—something to do. It also feels like there needs to be a place where the spirit, that un-weighable part of the whole, can linger, or leave a mark. It feels like those of us that are left are duty bound to make that place, or that mark. To signpost the threshold where our lost ones stepped through the door.”
I think retreats serve this purpose as well. Even if that retreat is simply packing one’s pickup and heading out to where the pavement hits the sand, with nothing more than a few crumpled twenties in your pocket and a cooler of cold things to share with friends.
The first rule of Complicated Mother’s Day Club is…
In this post, I share crowdsourced advice from this community for “things to do” if you are not the one at the center of the loss, but you want to help. I also went all in on 90s memes, because, well, how could they not help?
I hope you’ll pass this post on to someone who needs it this month. And if you know someone who is suffering or has suffered pregnancy or infant loss, who is currently seeking community, please know that you can come sit next to me. I’ve gone from gathering with fellow grievers to co-hosting my own grief groups with RTZ Hope this year — part of that life/death/life cycle of rebirth for me, I suppose — and I’d love to see you there. Link here for more info.
A cool, cloudy day in the backyard , watching my mother pull clothes pins out of her apron hanging out our family clothes.