Grief/Loss/Feelings Tag

10 Dec

Posted at 23:02h in Sarah's Journal by

What is the story here? This is a visual landscape of decay, of impending change. There is a need for housing in the city that ordinary people can afford. There is pressure on local councils to provide more affordable housing from a depleted housing stock. Local government housing budgets are squeezed. Property developers and housing associations take over estates and mop up the profits. Developers are keen to maximize profits. There is limited space in the city. Gentrification is pricing out local people. We live in a time where austerity cuts the public services that buffer some of the worst injustices in our society. I live in a society where the rich are rewarded and the poor lose more. I know that the economic divide impacts health, education, access to services, quality of life and life expectancy. We live in times where corporate greed fuels politics. We have lost trust in politicians. Young lives are collateral in a system that does not value their creativity and gifts. Wall space is claimed for personal expression, and for competitive tagging. We live in times where power is wielded at the expense of people and planet. I have a vote.

20 Nov

Posted at 21:52h in Sarah's Journal by

Here I sit, right now in time. I feel the reassuring support of this seat and my breath spiralling in and out. I also notice how much the present is coloured by responses to my lived experience. In grief rituals that connect body with feelings and mind there is the possibility of surfacing some of the old emotional deposits  stored in our cells in order to clear them. One reason is to be more available to live fully in the present. In my psyche and in the context of grief rituals the future looms large. The present era with all its injustices, inequalities, floods and raging wildfires will give rise to what comes next. Being here now is a worthy starting point, but I am wary that without a more intentional framework, without a commitment to being of service, to fulfilling my highest potential to be fully me, it might be another kind of disconnect.

18 Nov

Posted at 17:13h in Sarah's Journal by

As we leave Union Chapel, the shadow of the gate plays on the wall. We have been to ‘Breathing Space’, a night of meditation with Boe and Bilal. Given space to honour our pain for the world, we discuss ‘the great unravelling’ as Joanna Macy names it – the shadow consequences of ‘business as usual’ caused by the industrial growth economy. The acknowledgement and naming of the shadow, the unseen, brings power through seeing the whole. Everything has a shadow. “That which you do not love regresses and turns hostile to you”, states Jung, whose wisdom illuminated ‘the shadow’. I sit today with my own dark side – the imposter, the incompetent as well as the righteous. Pickle (aged hound), now fairly deaf and near blind moved toward my shadow, which was skulking on the stairs; he then jumped to find my body behind him. I observe the play of light and dark, see the beauty in the shadow curlicues on the wall. The next evening in the series is ‘Active Hope’.
www.unionchapel.org.uk/event/11-12-19-spirituality-in-powerful-times/

09 Oct

Posted at 22:47h in Sarah's Journal by

A pod of grievers meet at low tide at the edge of the Thames in earshot of St Paul’s. We make a circle from mud-larked bones and oyster shells. We are here to mark the death of the humpback whale marooned by hunger or disorientation in the estuary. A whale vertibrae the size of a child’s skull is passed round the circle. It is porous, white and lighter than I imagined. One by one we sing to the spirit of this whale, sing it home on a river of tears and gratitude. Hump backed whales mourn each other with song. I don’t find the words to express my sense of loss. I am dismayed by this example of the dislocation from right-relationship between place, food and the hierarchy of species in the natural world. This is a profound breach of natural order, an out of place death. How big a sign will it take before we recognise the extent of our selfishness?

04 Oct

Posted at 17:40h in Sarah's Journal by

I have been wondering when it begins – the shutting down of grief in community? On trains recently I have been aware of parents shushing babies and toddlers. Is it because we have become intolerant of other people’s children crying? Parents feel embarrassment and shame at their child’s public bawling. Have we become judges of parental failings and tired babies (either real or projected)? Are we just so uncomfortable with our own sorrows that we want to banish others’ into private spaces? We are programmed to respond to these cries, but when does soothing and calming become silencing? Can we hold baby’s screaming and wailing more compassionately as a collective?

25 Sep

Posted at 22:06h in Sarah's Journal by

A selection of apparently unrelated items nestle in the crematorium waiting room. They have each been chosen to give the illusion of comfort and safety in an environment that most will encounter during a period of very uncomfortable loss of emotional safety. The artifice of these flowers, the institutional furniture, intended to make me feel at home, highlights instead the way the business of dying has been hived off away from the clutter of home and family life.

20 Sep

Posted at 19:51h in Book Reviews by

“If there is ever to be any real peace on earth, all people need to relearn and re-establish the now diminished and hidden arts of Grief and Praise, for one without the other is not possible.” Martin Prechtel’s uncompromising and passionate message rubs off the page. His words seduce with rowdy charm. He urges us to shake off our avoidance of grief, to embrace life through praise, to recognise the consequences of the “unmetabolized war grief of past generations”. Ideas grown in hot dry New Mexico land amongst sage, marjoram and lavender, taking root in a very English garden.

16 Sep

Posted at 18:07h in Culture Reviews by

I often listen to Cariad Lloyd’s chatty podcast. She talks to comedians about grief and death. At the Podcast Festival I watch a live recording of ‘Grief Cast’ featuring Keemah Bob, Jenny Bede and Tom Parry. Cariad is personable, asks questions which invite saying the unsayable in a very natural way. In response we laugh at the pomp of social norms around death, share dark tales of funeral meets lavatory humour and demystify the secrecy around the process of death and dying. Afterwards I play at interviewer, re-wind the questions in my head.www.cariadlloyd.com/griefcast

 

14 Sep

Posted at 14:14h in Sarah's Journal by

Usually the documentarian, this time I am under scrutiny. Our smiles mirror through the lens. I wear only one silver ring, my fingers often marked by ink. The words that waltz and foxtrot daily in my head unexpectedly tumble out in torrents. I am excited by the problems behind the enquiry. How do we welcome in mortality? How can we reclaim a deeper knowing of the cycle of life and death? What is the most effective way to change our relationship with grief? My unbridled ideas pour out, some of which may snag on the researcher’s hook to be reeled in.

28 Aug

Posted at 21:43h in Culture Reviews by

This is an acerbic, witty slice of the politics of 1988. It shows a stone hurled from Thatcher’s Britain and the consequences reverberating into 2019. Lindsay Duncan and Alex Jennings spar with brilliance as a tory minister and his bitingly sarcastic wife. The punch, however, when it comes demonstrates the destructive power of undigested grief. Simon Woods underlying manifesto is a prayer for compassion.
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/hansard