"Sorrow is a sustained note in the song of being alive. To be human is to know loss in its many forms."
"We were not meant to live shallow lives, pocked by meaningless routines and the secondary satisfaction of happy hour. We are the inheritors of an amazing lineage, rippling with memories of life lived intimately with bison and gazelle, raven and the night sky. We are designed to encounter this life with amazement and wonder, not resignation and endurance. This is at the very heart of our grief and sorrow. The dream of full-throated living, woven into our every being, has often been forgotten and neglected, replaced by a societal fiction of productivity and material gain."
"This book is about grief, about its many moods and movements, shapes and textures. It is about how sorrow carves riverbeds in our soul, deepening us as it flows in and out of our lives."
"Establishing a relationship with grief, developing practices that keep us steady in times of distress, and staying present in our adult selves are among the central tasks in our apprenticeship with sorrow. This is the hard work of maturation. In the traditional language of apprenticeship, this would be called achieving mastery. In the language of soul, this is the work of becoming an elder. An elder is able to touch grief deftly and is able to craft sorrow into something nourishing for the community."
"Grief work is soul work. It requires courage to face the world as it is and not turn away, to not burrow into a hole of comfort and anesthetization"
"Without this awareness and willingness to be shaped by life, we remain caught in the adolescent strategies of avoidance and heroic striving."
"I am not suggesting that we live a life preoccupied with sorrow. I am saying that our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us, our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness, condemns us to a life shadowed by grief. Welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. This is the secret to being fully alive."
"A sense of belonging offers us much-needed medicine in these times, which are marked by feelings of anonymity and isolation. In fact, belonging protects the heart from much of life's unavoidable challenges."
"We tumble and fall as the ground beneath us opens, shaken by violent rumbling. Grief unfolds our lives, drops us close to the earth, reminding us of our inevitable return to the dark soil."
"'How can we take a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, lethargy, or misery? Disneyland means 'no ashes.''"
"What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth."
"Shame ruptures our connection with life and with our soul. It is, indeed, a sickness of the soul. When feelings of shame arise, we pull back from the world, avoiding contact that could cause or risk exposure. The last thing we want in times of excruciating self-consciousness is to be seen."
"Shame closes the heart to self-compassion. We live with an internal state best characterized as self-hatred. In order to loosen shame's grip on our lives, we need to make three moves. The first is from feeling worthless to seeing ourselves as wounded. The second emerges from the first and is a shift from seeing ourselves through the lens of contempt to one of a budding compassion. And the third is moving from silence to sharing. As long as we see our suffering as evidence of worthlessness, we will not move toward our wounds with anything but judgment."
"What is the vow your soul is waiting for you to make? What will you have to sacrifice in order to honor that vow?"
"It is our deep grief that the village did not appear."
"Instead, what is asked of us in the quiet terrain of our inner conversations is to hold these regrets with gentleness, acknowledging who we were at the time we made those choices."
"What if, however, the feelings we have when we pass through these zones of destruction are actually arising from the land itself? What if it is the grief of the forest registering in our bodies and psyches - the sorrow of the redwoods, voles, sorrel, ferns, owls, and deer, all those who lost their homes and lives as a result of this plunder of living beings?"
"To live a life of soul means living with sensitivity to the plight of the planet."
"Our inheritance includes an intimate and permeable exchange with the wild world. It is what our minds and bodies expect."
"We, too, are meant to embody a vivid and animated life, to live close to our wild souls, our wild bodies and minds. We were meant to dance and sing, play and laugh unselfconsciously, tell stories, make love, and take delight in this brief but privileged adventure of incarnation."
"We become acutely aware that there is no 'out there'; we have one continuous existence, one shared skin. Our suffering is mutually entangled, the one with the other, as is our healing."
"Our profound feelings of lacking something are not a reflection of a personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liefloff concludes, 'what was once man's confident expectation for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain."
"Another facet of loss at this gate concerns the expectation of purpose in our lives. Deep in our bones lies an intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community. Over time, these gifts are meant to be seen, developed, and called into the village at times of need."
"We often feel flattened under the weight of domestication, which smothers the heat and howl of our wild selves. We feel eviscerated, made tame by rules and conditioning that blanket the world with uniformity and mediocrity."
"To be left with a 'shrunken residue' or to walk around 'possessed by the dullest parts' of ourselves is a great loss."
"To not be cut off, however, we need to be moving in a rhythm that is syncopated with that of the oaks and willows, heartbeats and touch. We must recall the original cadence of the soul."
"When that emptiness appeared, the arms of community were there to hold me, helping me to endure the terror of that aloneness. It was because I felt held and loved that I was able to descend into these places of darkness."
"To be empty, to feel empty, is to live in the wasteland near the gates of death. This is intolerable to the soul. We were not meant to live such shallow lives."
"When we feel hesitant or uncertain of our worthiness to touch our sorrows, knowing these gates are there offers us a way to connect with our losses, wounds, and disappointments."
"The powerful presence of the family and community of the individual who is ill broadens the context of illness to include the entire village. This recognizes that everyone is impacted by the illness. This is powerful medicine, as it frees the individual from having to carry the weight of the illness alone, which, as we have seen is a major preoccupation of the Western mind."
"Ritual offers two things required to fully let go of the grief we carry: containment and release. Containment offers the holding space for the ones in grief. It provides the safe place to fall, to descend into the depths of both the known and unknown layers of sorrow."
"Grief has never been private; it has always been communal. Subconsciously, we are awaiting the presence of others, before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow."
"Our activism is directly connected to our heart's ability to respond to the world."
"Ritual signals to the psyche that a different order has been established, one that invites alternative styles of behavior and modes of social engagement."
"Ritual can bring us into that state of togetherness, and there we can remember our deeper affinity and communality."
"Life is far too complex to rely solely on our intellect. We need the invisible hands of Spirit to shelter us, to support us, and to offer us the nourishment comfort that comes from that Other World. This concert between the human and the sacred is ancient; it is held in the bones. Trust this bond. It is our healing ground."
"The truth is we need both the vital exhalation of community and the renewing inhalation of our interior lives for our grief to move and change over our long walk with sorrow. Our healing is in 'every small contracting and expanding.'"
"I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every minute holy." - Rilke
"The most commonly noted obstacle, perhaps, is that we live in a flatline culture, one that avoids depths of feeling."
"When we send our grief into exile, we simultaneously condemn our lives to an absence of joy. This gray-sky existence is intolerable to the soul. It shouts at us daily to do something about it, but in the absence of meaningful ways to respond to sorrow or from the sheer terror of entering the terrain of grief naked, we turn instead to distraction, addiction, or anesthesia."
"It is our job to openly grieve for the disappearance of wetlands, the destruction of forests, the shrinking whale populations, the erosion of soil, and on and on. We know the litany of loss, but we have collectively neglected our emotional response to this emptying of our world. We need to see and participate in grief rituals in every part of this country."
"We are here for such a short time, and the call to truly live is something to which we each must respond."
"Whatever the experience, grief offers a revelation: in the midst of great loss, we find ourselves in the presence of the sacred."
"Coming to trust darkness takes time and often involves many visits to this land."
"How do we say goodbye? How do we acknowledge all that has held beauty and value in our lives - those we love, those who touched our lives with kindness, those whose shelter allowed us to extend ourselves into the world? How do we let go of sunsets and making love, pomegranates and walks on the bluff? And yet, we must. We must release the entire, fantastic world with one last breath."
"There is another face to this grief of saying goodbye. We must acknowledge the sorrow that others will feel with our death. This is an especially tender sorrow, one we must bear in our soul, the consequence of having been privileged to enter another's heart."
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