Community grief tending is the practice of gathering with others to honor the sacredness of our sorrow. It is essential work for the times we’re in. It is the work that reconnects. There are so many reasons why remembering how to grieve together matters. Here are just a few to consider as you deepen your community grief tending practice:

1. We grieve together to find the courage and support to face what needs tending. We were never meant to carry this all alone. Since time immemorial, humans have gathered to grieve. Yet today, so many of us feel disconnected and confused because we’ve lost contact with the ancestral rituals and teachings that once guided us. Without these, our grief is left unnamed and unacknowledged and we end up feeling like something is wrong with us – which couldn’t be further from the truth. Grief is sometimes the only sane response to what is happening in our lives and in our world. So we reach for each other to remember how to do this together again. And we reach for strength through the courage of others who are willing to show up alongside us.

2. We grieve together to rebuild our trust in grief. Our grief phobic, death denying culture does not show us how to welcome grief. So when it inevitably arrives at our doorstep, it can feel like an invasion. We don’t trust where it might take us, so we push it away or keep it at a distance, afraid of what might happen if we feel it fully. Afraid it might carry us into the wilderness and we won’t find our way back. But if we listen closely, there is a deeper call waiting for us in the darkness. A call back to a time and place when we were a people who had the capacity for navigating this wild terrain. Who had the cultural support to transmute the bitterness of sorrow into something of great value to the community – something we are in desperate need of today. So we start slowly, with support, and practice turning towards our grief again and again, one step at a time.

3. We grieve together to stand in the face of systemic oppression, humanitarian crises, species diminishment, and seemingly impossible global challenges and keep our hearts open. Unmetabolized grief inevitably leads to feelings of isolation, loneliness, despair, depression, and even violence and fury. From this place of pain, cycles of harm become perpetuated, often unconsciously, and wreak havoc within our family systems, communities, and across the globe. Community grief tending is a form of activism that actually begins to mend these wounds by bringing us back into relationship and belonging. Without a deep sense of connection, how could we possibly stay present and responsive to the growing cries of our world? So we reach for each other as an act of protest, and we gather to grieve for the sake of our planet and for all living things.