Ritual ....for the grief we carry.

It rains all day.

The early mist never lifts.

It's so gloomy in the house

that I need the lights on all the  time.

The mist turns to fog by afternoon.

I wait in for the heating engineer to come and service the boiler.

But when he arrives he says he can't do it because it's an LPG boiler and he's not qualified to touch it.

Who knew?  But he gives me the number of someone who can. I make an appointment for next week and just trust it will be within my warranty.

I spend a long time at my desk doing the accounts...juggling figures. I run out of printer paper. I know I have more but it's in an unopened packing box somewhere... I start looking, opening boxes which say on the label in black felt tip pen - written 6months ago "Trish's Study" and almost immediately find a book I have also been looking for.

It's by  Francis Weller  - the man who wrote the article about grief that I read yesterday. It's called 

"The Wild Edge of Sorrow - Rituals fo Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief".

I have mentioned it in this blog before, quoted some of the poems which I love....particularly a 12th century one by Emmanuel of Rome ...''Tis a fearful thing

 to love 

what death can touch...."

 In the Wild Edge of Sorrow, Weller writes  about the "power of ritual to help us transform grief into a force that allows us to live and love more fully."

I haven't felt the need up to now for anything like a ritual...my grief feels so personal so private....even though I  have superb counselling and I write about it here.....which is a kind of ritual in itself...a safe place to express some of it.

But re-reading these words  has struck such a cord, made me wonder if it would help...with the right people ...at the right time.

'To fully release the grief we carry, two things are required: containment and release. In the absence of genuine community, the container is nowhere to be found and by default we become the container and cannot drop into the space which we can fully let go of the sorrows we carry.

In this situation we re-cycle our grief, moving into it and then pulling back into our bodies unreleased. 

Grief has NEVER been private. It has always been communal. We are often awaiting the others so we can drop into the holy grounds of sorrow not even knowing we are doing so".

Something feels so true about this....it is so good to have it named... I know about the containtment side of it all .... becoming the container ... and I have doubts and reservations about the release side of it..the community/ritual side of it....but the fact I can even contemplate it means that maybe it's the next  fragile step for me. 

It is still raining tonight  - I can hear the water drops pummelling the garage roof and the steam rushing along in the darkness...gathering a community of tears as it flows past the oak tree and the plane tree..... on its way to I don't know where.